Oh dear. A 2005 article in a National Geographic that you no doubt kept for the pictures of topless piccaninnies on page 38, a 3 line precis and the IPCC report which is based on computer simulations not the real world. I'm quaking. Speaking of which, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before global warming is blamed for the earthquake in Haiti.
Firstly, the unfortunate use of the Haiti earthquake as a football in our debate is deeply regrettable and I’m sure that it wasn’t meant to trivialise the sad deaths of many 1000s of people. I would hope that it is not used in future.
Secondly, the science isn’t good enough for you. Fine if you are a post-grad climatologist with a deep understanding of complex weather phenomena. Not so good if you are a holder of undergraduate web-surfing who has difficulty distinguishing ice area graphs and ice depth and density! Sorry I keep harking back to this, but it was and is HILARIOUS, and an insight into your scientific awareness. If respectable science led journals, primary evidence and extensively referenced, peer reviewed material are not enough for you, then I apologise for over-estimating your scientific credentials.
But it doesn’t matter anyway, because you have a ready made response for the wealth of material that doesn’t suit. It’s made up. Banks of scientists are creating data, making up information and inventing statistics. I needn’t bother looking for anything then, as teams of professionals are already working on the latest fabricated papers!
For those not inherently biased or influenced by strange websites, a summary of the issue:
The science is that water vapour is the most important greenhouse, but CO2 forces an artificial enhancement of the warming effect. A background here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... r-forcing/And a link to support for this in these scientific journals Nature, and Science:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2002/2002_DelGenio.pdfhttp://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 06207.htmlSince water vapour is such a comprehensive absorber, many of the [specroscopic] absorption lines of these gases do overlap with it, so it’s difficult to pin an exact number on how much any individual gas contributes to the natural greenhouse effect. However, with radiative transfer models it is possible to calculate the strength of the greenhouse effect if we just had other greenhouse gases, without water vapour or clouds. When we do so, we get about 35% of the total. We can also calculate the strength if we just had water vapour, but no other gases. When we do this, we get about 85%. So the truth is that water vapour and clouds are responsible for somewhere between 65 and 85% of the natural greenhouse effect. This is not the 99.9% effect claimed by sceptics.
The current problem has arisen because we are artificially “enhancing” this natural balanced phenomenon through our carbon emissions from vehicles, industry and power generation using fossil fuels. Indeed, we’ve been upsetting this balance significantly since the middle of the twentieth century and some would argue since the dawn of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth.
By massively increasing the amount of non-water vapour greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we are increasing the amount of heat trapped by the atmosphere. Not only that, but warmer temperatures are causing more water to evaporate into the atmosphere. A British scientist proved this in 2007 (see footnote reference). So not only are humans artificially enhancing the non-water part of the greenhouse effect, we are also increasing levels of water vapour as well. And that has to be a lose-lose situation.
Willett, K., Gillett, N., Jones, P., & Thorne, P. (2007). Attribution of observed surface humidity changes to human influence Nature, 449 (7163), 710-712 DOI: 10.1038/nature06207
These studies used the AIRS data to show that surface warming leads to an increase in water vapor. This water vapor acts as a greenhouse gas and amplifies the surface warming. The AIRS observations are also consistent with warming predicted by numerical climate models, increasing confidence in model predictions of future warming.
Dessler, A. E., Z. Zhang, and P. Yang (2008), Water-vapor climate feedback inferred from climate fluctuations, 2003'2008, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L20704, doi:10.1029/2008GL035333.
Gettelman, A., and Q. Fu, 2008: Observed and Simulated Upper-Tropospheric Water Vapor Feedback. J. Climate, 21, 3282'3289.And again, not three lines but 4 seperate studies in support.
Cess et al., 1990; Hall and Manabe, 1999; Schneider et al., 1999; Held and Soden, 2000 found that...
water vapour feedback acts to amplify other feedbacks in models, such as cloud feedback and ice albedo feedback. If cloud feedback is strongly positive, the water vapour feedback can lead to 3.5 times as much warming as would be the case if water vapour concentration were held fixed.Let's see next what you have in relation to the WHOLE of your position.....