The Greenhouse Effect Explored
Is “Water Vapor Feedback” Positive or Negative?
Exploiting the medium of Youtube Carl Brehmer is drawing wider attention to a fascinating experiment he performed to test the climatic impacts of water in our atmosphere.
Carl explains, “An essential element of the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis is the positive “water vapor feedback” hypothesis. That is, if something causes an increase in the temperature this will cause an increase in the evaporation of water into water vapor.”
Principia Scientific International, with kind permission from Carl, reproduces the following:
It is claimed that this new humidity will absorb more of the infrared radiation coming off of the ground. This increased absorption of infrared radiation is believed by some climate scientists to warm the air even further. This allegedly makes the air able to hold even more water vapor and this result in even more evaporation, which increases the humidity even further and the cycle starts over.
This is called a “positive” feedback mechanism, since water vapor is believed to amplify atmospheric warming. Carl writes, “Being curious about the truth of this hypothesis I designed a simple experiment to study the effect of rising and falling levels of humidity on soil and air temperature and discovered that the addition of water to a climate system exerts a significant negative feedback against temperature changes night and day.”
Among his other findings Carl found that:
· Water vapor has the same graphical relationship to temperature that insulin has to blood sugar and insulin is known to exert a strong negative feedback against blood sugar levels;
· Over the course of time the addition of water to a climate system causes a perceptible drop in the yearly mean temperature.
So what does this all mean? Although it is true that warmer temperatures create higher humidity in climates where there is water in the soil to evaporate, that greater humidity demonstrably does not lead to even more warming.
“Quite the contrary, as we have seen the presence of water in a climate system exerts a negative feedback on temperatures both day and night, which stabilizes the wide diurnal swings in temperature seen in arid climates and, over time causes humid climates to be some what cooler on average than arid climates, “ says Carl. In this sense water acts as the earth’s thermostat and not its heater.
The observations made in this paper also falsify any notion that there could ever be runaway global warming driven by positive water vapor feedback where the oceans evaporate into the atmosphere and all life on earth perishes. Why? Because “water feedback” is negative feedback and if it were going to happen it already would have.
Read the full experiment and watch Carl’s fascinating video here.
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