EPA Seeks To Have Water Vapor Classified As A Pollutant

EPA Seeks To Have Water Vapor Classified As A Pollutant

This jet condensation trail seen at sunset will gradually evaporate, increasing the water vapor content of the atmosphere. Since a wide variety of human activities produce water vapor, the Earth's main greenhouse gas, the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking to have it designated as a pollutant.

(Washington, DC) The Environmental Protection Agency is seeking to classify water vapor as a pollutant, due to its central role in global warming. Because water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, accounting for at least 90% of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect, its emission during many human activities, such as the burning of fuels, is coming under increasing scrutiny by federal regulators.

Until now, the carbon dioxide produced during the burning of fuels has been the main concern. The extra carbon dioxide causes a manmade enhancement of the greenhouse effect. But water vapor is also produced by combustion of most fuels, as well as by industry and utilities that use water for cooling. The EPA would be able to regulate its manmade sources if it is classified as a pollutant. EPA Director of the Department of Pollutant Decrees, Ray Donaldson, said, "Back before carbon dioxide was dangerous, we simply assumed that water vapor was also benign. But all reputable scientists now agree that the increased water vapor content of the atmosphere from such sources as burning of fuels and power plant cooling towers will also enhance the greenhouse effect, leading to potentially catastrophic warming."

If successful, the push to classify water vapor as a dangerous pollutant would impact virtually everyone. For instance, homeowners could see a wide variety of common activities that cause evaporation being regulated: watering the lawn, or using a hot tub or swimming pool. "Right now, we are not so concerned about the water vapor exhaled by people. That is low on our list of priorities", said Mr. Donaldson. "We'll tackle that manmade source at a later time." One likely result of such regulation would be an additional tax on fuels used by cars, trucks, passenger jets, and a wide variety of industries and utilities.

Predictably, the Bush Administration has voiced opposition to any regulation of water vapor emissions. White House staffer Lew Moninsky told ecoEnquirer, "This is simply ridiculous. The EPA wants to regulate all human activity out of existence. What about the massive amounts of water vapor being evaporated from the world's oceans every second? That's OK?, but human production of small amounts of vapor isn't? If it weren't for water vapor, there would be no rainfall! Give me a break!" "Well, of course the Administration would say that…", said Mr. Donaldson, "..they're in the pocket of 'big oil' anyway."

The EPA is rumored to have a rather extensive list of potential pollutants in addition to water vapor, and some insiders claim that all known chemical compounds are targeted for future regulation. When informed of the rumored list of chemicals, Mr. Moninsky asked, "Well, since everything is made of chemicals, I guess that means that even every molecule of your body will be subject to regulation as well, doesn't it?"

Asked for their position on the matter, Greenpolice spokesperson Rainbow Treetower stated, "Our basic policy is, if it's good for people, it's bad for the planet."

(stolen from:)

Clouds, Water Vapor, Not Accounted For In Climate Models

The role that water vapor, and the formation and dissipation of clouds in the Earth's atmosphere play a crucial role in climate and of course weather, prediction. However, this complex process is not well understood, or accounted for in the computer models used to predict future climate change. More and more scientists are coming forth in agreement, as the following article documents.

There is more on this subject here on my blog. Search for Lindzen, Roy Spencer, Gray, Bryson, among many notable climate scientists who agree that we just don't know enough about the role of water vapor and clouds to accurately model the climate.
Peter


from:
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.asp?Page=/Commentary/archive/200708/COM20070816c.html


A Cloudy Mystery
By Alan Caruba CNSNews.com Commentary from the National Anxiety Center August 16, 2007

There's a reason why one should be extremely wary of the computer models that are cited by the endless doomsday predictions of Al Gore, the UN's International Panel on Climate Change, and all the other advocates of "global warming. " The reason is clouds. Computer models simply cannot provide for the constant variability of clouds, so they ignore them.

In a July issue of The Economist an article called "Grey-Sky thinking" was subtitled, "Without understanding clouds, understanding the climate is hard. And clouds are the least understood part of the atmosphere. " Since the increasingly rabid claims of Earth's destruction from rising temperatures depend on computer modeling, how can they be regarded as accurate if they must largely exempt or deliberately manipulate the impact of clouds? How can you make predictions, whether it's a week or a decade from now, if you haven't a clue why clouds do what they do?

Tim Garrett, a research meteorologist at the University of Utah, with refreshing candor has said, "We really do not know what's going on. There are so many basic unanswered questions on how they (clouds) work." And that is never mentioned in the great "global warming" debate, one we are continuously told is "decided" and upon which there is a vast scientific "consensus. "This is particularly significant because clouds act to both cool and warm the Earth. It is widely believed that high clouds can reflect solar radiation away from the planet, but they can also serve to trap heat in the atmosphere.

New studies, however, have given some cause to reconsider this. Moreover, cloud droplets can last for less than a second while whole clouds can live out their lives in minutes or days. There is no way to integrate such massive, constant change into a computer model that divides the world into boxes up to sixty miles on a side, so they mostly do not. This is why there are two new missions by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration involving highly sophisticated devices to measure and study the actions of clouds. This is also why, up to now, the computer models on which "global warming" claims have been made have actually been tweaked, adjusted, manipulated -- take your choice of terms -- to factor in the mystery of clouds.

How wide is the computer modeling gap when it comes to predicting the weather? The Economist reported that, "In a recent paper in Climate Dynamics, Mark Webb of Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Change and his colleagues reported that clouds account for 66% of the differences between members of one important group of models and for 85% of them in another group." Clouds simply defy the logarithms of computer modelers.

In short, "Too much still remains unknown about the physical mechanisms that determine cloud behavior," said The Economist. Here's a useful scientific definition of the weather: "atmospheric conditions at a given time and a particular location." Drive a few miles in any direction and the weather is likely to be different. Stay put and it will change soon enough. My other favorite definition is "chaos."

In an August 2002 article, "The Trouble with the Weather", the European Space Agency noted that, "Forecasting the weather remains notoriously difficult because the atmosphere is not easy to predict, being affected by such factors as air pressure and temperature, air movements, the distribution of water in its various states (clouds) in the atmosphere, and static electricity stored in the air."

"Clouds are that 800-pound gorilla," says research meteorologist, Gerald Mace, also of the University of Utah, referring to the critical role they play in the weather on any portion of planet Earth. That gorilla, however, is never mentioned by the "global warming" propagandists. Neither clouds, nor volcanoes, nor the most important factor, the Sun, is credited as responsible for either the climate or the weather. Instead, we are constantly told that "human activity" is the single cause. Unmentioned, too, is the fact that water vapor constitutes 95% of all greenhouse gases. Environmentalists insist that carbon dioxide plays a major role. It is well to keep in mind, however, that CO2 is the gas that is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth.

Nor do global warming advocates remind people that the Earth is at the end of the interglacial period between Ice Ages which suggests another one is due any day now. Indeed, the only global warming that is occurring has been happening since the end of the last mini-Ice Age in the 1800s. It is a natural response and is not a dramatic rise of four to ten degrees. It doesn't even represent one-half a degree increase.

Following the publication of the results of new study in the journal of the American Geophysical Union revealing that the absence of clouds actually had a cooling affect-the opposite of widely held opinion on the role of clouds-Dr. Roy Spencer of the Earth System Science Center noted that, "To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent. The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming.

"If leading meteorologists remain largely ignorant of why clouds do what they do, why would we pay any attention to those with a financial or ideological incentive to propagate "global warming" claims? There is, however, a difference between being ignorant and being stupid. Believing the "global warming" lies is stupid.
(Alan Caruba writes "Warning Signs," a weekly column posted at the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center. The views expressed are those of the writer.)

NASA Says: The Greenhouse Effect - It's Mostly About Water

I guess nobody pays attention to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), surely not politicians, celebrities, and environmentalists who claim to have such strong feelings about Mother Earth.

The Earth receives its heat from the Sun, and some of it is trapped in the atmosphere by water in various forms, mainly vapor. NASA has an annual budget of $16.8 Billion for 2007. Maybe more people should listen to what they have to say.

Why is there such a rush and panic to demonize carbon dioxide when even NASA says it plays only a minor role in global warming. Why don't we see more news articles such as the following?
Peter

from: http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/News/Features/FeaturesClimateChange/GreenhouseEffect/

Features: NASA's New Satellite Takes on Global Change
The Greenhouse Effect - It's Mostly About Water

A real greenhouse is made of glass, which lets visible sunlight through from the outside. This light gets absorbed by all the materials inside, and the warmed surfaces radiate infrared light, sometimes called "heat rays", back. But the glass, although transparent to visible light, acts as a partial barrier to the infrared light. So some of this infrared radiation, or heat, gets trapped inside. The result is that everything inside the greenhouse, including the air, becomes warmer.

Similarly, light from the sun passes almost unhindered through Earth's atmosphere. It gets absorbed by the ocean and land surfaces, which warm and radiate infrared energy (heat!) back into the atmosphere. However, some atmospheric gases absorb these heat rays and trap the energy inside the atmosphere. The net result is warming.

The most prominent green house gas is water vapor. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is also very important, and there are a number of minor green house gases as well. AIRS is the first satellite to measure the three-dimensional global distribution of atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide from space.

Water plays a very complex role in the atmosphere, because it can exist as a gas in the form of water vapor, a liquid in the form of water clouds and rain, and a solid in the form of ice clouds and snow. Although water in its vapor form will usually enhance the greenhouse effect, clouds can sometimes act like a greenhouse gas and sometimes can weaken it. Some types of clouds trap infrared heat rays, and some types of clouds reflect sunlight back to space very efficiently and prevent this energy from contributing to the heating process.

Clouds that are low in the atmosphere are warm and thus radiate heat back to space at a greater rate than high altitude clouds which are colder. High cold clouds are usually reflective, typically because they consist of very small droplets of small to large ice crystals. It's easy to tell by just looking: if a cloud is white, it is reflecting sunlight; if it is dark, it is usually absorbing sunlight (and the darker it is, the more likely it is to rain). Also, how a cloud behaves radiatively depends more on the size of the droplets or ice particles and the water content than on its temperature.

Water cycles through many forms. It falls as rain or snow, soaks into the soil, runs into lakes and oceans, and evaporates again into atmospheric water vapor, where it can condense into cloud droplets and eventually fall as rain and snow. We call this the water cycle.

If Earth's water flows through this cycle at a faster pace, it is likely that more clouds will form. However, because the effects of clouds can vary, it¹s not obvious whether this will lead to global warming or cooling - or neither. This is a primary focus for scientists working with AIRS data.

More on Why Carbon Dioxide Is Not Causing Global Warming

This is pretty technical information, but worth digesting. There is more, much more.
Peter
from: http://nov55.com/ntyg.html

CO2 Absorption
There is no Valid Mechanism for CO2 Creating Global Warming
Proof one: Laboratory measurements show that carbon dioxide absorbs to extinction at its main peak in 10 meters under atmospheric conditions.* This means there is no radiation left at those frequencies after 10 meters. If then humans double their 3% input of CO2 into the atmosphere, the distance of absorption reduces to 9.7m. A reduction in distance is not an increase in temperature. Convectional currents stir the heat around removing any relevance for distance.
Scientists who promote the global warming hype try to work around this fact by claiming something different happens higher in the atmosphere, which they claim involves unsaturation. The difference due to height is that the absorption peaks get smaller and sharper, so they separate from each other. Near the earth's surface, the absorption peaks for water vapor partially overlap the absorption peaks for CO2. Supposedly, in some obfuscated way, separating the peaks creates global warming. There is no real logic to that claim. It is nothing but an attempt to salvage global warming propaganda through obfuscation of complexities.
What it means is that climatologists admit there is no mechanism at lower levels of the atmosphere, and their rationalization for higher up is phony.

It's important to realize that radiation from the sun does not greatly heat the atmosphere, because the sun must give off high frequency radiation in the area of visible light, which goes through the atmosphere. Something as hot as the sun cannot give off low frequency radiation, called infrared. This means that the sun's radiation heats the surface of the earth, and then the heat moves from the earth's surface into the atmosphere through conduction, convection, evaporation and infrared radiation. The infrared radiation can be absorbed by so-called greenhouse gasses.

The Absorption Peaks
Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (IR) in three narrow bands of frequencies, which are 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µM). This means that most of the heat producing radiation escapes it. About 8% of the available black body radiation is picked up by these "fingerprint" frequencies of CO2.
Heinz Hug* showed that carbon dioxide in the air absorbs to extinction at its 15µM peak in about ten meters. This means that CO2 does whatever it's going to do in that amount of space. Twice as much CO2 would do the same thing in about 5m. There's no significant difference between 5m and 10m for global warming, because convectional currents mix the air in such short distances.

But humans could not double the CO2, because they only put 3% of the CO2 in the air. If they put twice as much in, it would do whatever it does in 9.7m instead of 10m. If humans stopped putting any CO2 in the air, it would do whatever it does in 10.3m instead of 10m. In other words, nothing humans do with CO2 could be of the slightest relevance to global warming, even if oceans were not regulating it.
(The weaker peaks and shoulders of the peaks absorb in longer distances. While strongest absorption occurs in 10m, weaker absorption for CO2 occurs in about 300 meters. But a 3% increase in CO2 is still only a 3% reduction in the 300m distance for the weak absorption areas.)

The Attempted Fix
This is nothing new. Climate scientists know that more CO2 does not result in more heat under usual conditions. So the mythologists among them try to salvage the global warming propaganda by pretending that something esoteric occurs higher in the atmosphere. The difference is that the absorption peaks for CO2 separate from the peaks for water vapor. Then supposedly, radiation which misses CO2 does not get picked up by water vapor and travels into outer space; and more CO2 causes less radiation to get missed on the shoulders of the peaks.
Everything about that rationalization stretches reality to a point of misrepresentation. The increase in CO2 levels could only be relevant for the last cycle of absorption near the outer edges of the atmosphere, where there is not enough influence of the lower atmosphere to be significant. But the rationalizers claim it is significant in the mid levels of atmosphere. Not so. A 3% increase in CO2 would only shorten the distance of radiation travel by 3% before total absorption occurs.

In other words, at mid levels of the atmosphere, the center of the peaks would absorb at about 30m instead of 10m, while the shoulders would absorb at about 1,000m instead of 300m. Reducing those distance by 3% is not relevant. But just like relativity, if it takes more than a mouthful of arguing to prove them wrong, frauds decree the obfuscation to be fact.
As shown on the page titled "Crunching the Numbers," the quantities involved are so miniscule as to be totally incapable of causing global warming.

There's another major reason why the fix is unreal. Supposedly, it is the outer shoulders on the CO2 peaks which are responsible for global warming. Not only is a small percent of the CO2 influenced by the shoulder radiation, but the distance increases for absorption. There is more nitrogen and oxygen per CO2 molecule in this area. Dilution reduces the temperature increase per unit of energy. If there is 5% as much CO2 on the shoulders, it is spread over 20 times as much space in the atmosphere. This means the temperature effect on the shoulders should be multiplied times 5% twice—once for the decrease in amount of CO2 and once for the dilution of the energy in the atmosphere. So much dilution of so few molecules could not be responsible for a significant amount of temperature increase.
The miniscule area of concern on the shoulders of the absorption peak for CO2 is shown on one of Heinz Hug's graphs, linked below.

The Ill-Informed Assumptions
The assumption of some persons is that shorter distances mean the heat stays in the atmosphere longer before escaping into space. Supposedly, the radiation will be re-emitted and re-absorbed more often, when distances are shorter. But they err in two ways. One is in not taking into account the convection which removes the relevance of short distances. The other is in assuming the direction is toward space.
When radiation is re-emitted in the atmosphere, it moves in all directions. The energy does not move closer to space, because it is not directional. The only way heat can move toward the outer atmosphere is through convectional currents.
Here's how the dynamic works. The IR is emitted from the surface of the earth as black body radiation, which has a wide bandwidth. Then CO2 absorbs a fingerprint set of frequencies, which is 8% of the available black body radiation. As it is absorbed, it is instantly converted into heat (in less than a pico second). The heat is distributed over all molecules in the atmosphere, which means 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. After some time (probably about 10 hours), an equivalent amount of black body radiation is emitted from everything in the atmosphere, and 8% of it is absorbed by CO2 as fingerprint radiation.
Proponents do not have clear explanations for their assumptions. They use computer models and juggle the numbers until they get the results they want.

Adendum:
The fingerprint type of IR absorption is due to stretching and bending of internal bonds. Nitrogen does not do that. But all matter absorbs and emits IR in proportion to its temperature. This is called "black body" radiation. Physicists say all matter has the same characteristics in absorbing and emitting black body radiation, except that the quantitative proportions vary, mostly due to reflection. For nonreflective substances, such as wood and concrete, the percent IR absorbed or emitted (called emissivity or absorptivity) is around 90% of a perfect black body. Metals are good reflectors of IR, so they have an emissivity of around 50%. This means they emit or absorb about 50% of the infrared radiation which contacts them. Kirchhoff's law says emissivity equals absorptivity, which means everything absorbs and emits black body radiation in the same way.
There is a curve for black body radiation, and it applies to all matter. The curve slides toward higher frequencies for higher temperatures. At earth temperatures (around 300 degrees Kelvin) the black body curve (or Planks curve) peaks at a wavelength of about 10µM. The sides of the curve taper off at about 1µM and 30µM. Visible light is 0.4 to 0.8µM, which is just above the curve for cold black body radiation, but hot objects will radiate into the visible range, which is of course how an incandescent light bulb works. Carbon dioxide has fingerprint peaks at 2.7, 4.3 and 15µM, which are all within the black body radiation curve.
In some quantity, everything in the air including nitrogen and oxygen absorbs and emits black body radiation at frequencies which overlap the frequencies absorbed by CO2. In fact, the only reason why there is IR in the air is because the surface of the earth emits black body radiation in proportion to its temperature. The air then does the same thing at some level.
The question then is, in what quantity is the atmosphere absorbing and emitting black body radiation. The emissivity of nitrogen and oxygen gasses should be closed to 100%, since they do not reflect IR significantly. But the larger question is how does the quantity of black body absorption compare to the fingerprint absorption of CO2. Actual measurements and numbers do not seem to exist. So promoters use computer models to divide up the heat of the atmosphere between pollutants such as CO2 and everything else. They then pull such numbers out of the hat which say increases in CO2 levels will create a global temperature increase of about 6°C. This is about 20% of the 33°C which the atmosphere is said to contribute to the temperature of the globe.
Water is about a hundred times more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2, and it has a more effective fingerprint spectrum. It is also much more variable. This means water vapor will swamp whatever CO2 does. It is obviously not being honest to say CO2 does twenty percent of the heating, when there is a hundred times as much water vapor doing the same thing.
*Heinz Hug, The climate catastrophe - A spectroscopic artifact? (1998), John-Daly.com.http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htmGlobal Warming Main Page