Climate Change Slows Down
Everybody just knows that the man-made global warming is terrible and getting worse, don't they? The UN says so. The Union of Concerned Scientists says so. Everybody--except for some lying corporate shills--says so. So it must be so, right? Well, actually, perhaps there's been a bit of a rush to judgment.
A new Journal of Climate study of water vapor in the upper troposphere by researchers at the Universities of New Mexico and Maryland find that there is less water there than the computer climate models predict. Why does this matter? Because water vapor is the earth's chief greenhouse gas. The climate models incorporate a positive feedback loop in which higher levels of CO2 produces higher temperatures which increases the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold which further increases the temperature and so on. The bottom line is: Less water vapor, less warming.
How much less warming? Just taking these new findings into account reduces the projected warming by at least 25 percent. Of course, the satellite data still show a very mild average global temperatures increase over the past 25 years. Which brings up the question--which would you rather believe, the models or the earth?
