They avoid this question like the plague - Opinion
by Ronald Sones
Many years ago, like most of you, I became aware of a concern about what was then called Global Warming, and has since come to be known as Climate Change. By either name, the idea is that there is a physical effect known as the Greenhouse Effect. It’s caused by the action of sun light on certain gases in the atmosphere, known as Greenhouse Gases. The result of this action is that these gases absorb heat from the sun causing the surface of the Earth to be warmer than it would otherwise be, and this is largely responsible for the fact that life can survive and flourish on the planet.
The problem, though, is apparently that this greenhouse effect is now too strong, and over time is expected to cause overall climate to become too warm and thus cause problems such as glacial ice melting and sea levels rising to inundate coastal areas. And we are told that we must do something about this before it’s too late.
As I thought about this, I figured that if it’s even possible for people to do anything about this, then the thing to do would be to identify which greenhouse gas or gases are most responsible for the greenhouse effect, and then consider what could be done about them.
So the question that immediately came to mind was, “Which greenhouse gas or gases contribute the most to the greenhouse effect?” It seemed pretty obvious to me that the answer to this question should guide people as to where they should devote whatever efforts they could muster to mitigate the effect.
Using the Internet to research this question, I came up with some results like these:
https://globalchange.mit.edu/news-media/in-the-news/greenhouse-gases-water-vapor-and-you
https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/greenhouse_gas.htm
https://www.britannica.com/list/5-notorious-greenhouse-gases
According to these, the answer to the question is WATER VAPOR (a.k.a. humidity); it contributes anywhere from 50% to over 90% of the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide (CO2), at most, contributes only 10% to 20% of the greenhouse effect. If we could remove all CO2 from the atmosphere, we would have only a marginal effect on global warming. We would just kill off all plant life, and then all animal life that depends on plant life.
If you do your own search for this information, you’ll encounter many articles of a “Yes, but …” nature. They’ll generally tell you “Yes, water vapor is the predominant greenhouse gas, but there’s a linkage between water vapor and CO2 such that if CO2 levels rise, that causes a related rise in water vapor levels, creating a “positive feedback” effect. Therefore the levels of CO2 must be kept down so that they won’t amplify the levels of water vapor.”
This linkage effect is real and can be observed under laboratory conditions. But these laboratory conditions don’t exist in the real world. In the real world, CO2 comprises about 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere; it’s not this low percentage that’s significant, but rather the fact that this level stays nearly constant over the entire planet, and over long periods of time.
The global warming alarmists tell us that even small increases in this CO2 level will result in catastrophic effects over time, both on its own and in combination with the feedback effect with water vapor, and therefore we must take draconian steps to reduce the production of CO2 resulting from human activity.
Back to the real world though. In this world, as you can experience for yourself, humidity levels vary very widely over relatively short periods of time. Humidity levels are influenced by a wide variety of factors, such as temperature, barometric pressure, winds, clouds, altitude, time of day, topography and extent of foliage. The point is, in the real world, the effects caused by the linkage between CO2 and water vapor are negligible compared to the overall effects of water vapor alone.
I’m greatly amused by the ”environmentalists” who lobby for the use of hydrogen as a “clean” fuel. After all, burning hydrogen does not result in the production of any CO2, and that’s a good thing, right? Well, what does burning hydrogen produce? WATER VAPOR, and lots of it. Can you say “counterproductive”?
But what about the global warming problem? If it’s due to high levels of water vapor, what can be done about that? It would seem that we’d need to identify the most prominent sources of water and its evaporation to see what we can do about them. What are they? THE OCEANS, of course. So, to cut down on global warming to any significant degree, we only need to drain the oceans. That’s pretty simple, right?
Now you know why that question about the most prominent greenhouse gas is virtually never asked in the popular press. The answer simply doesn’t fit with their hubristic agendas of forcing people to take self-destructive steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
