Global Warming a fake?

[C1ay]

If man-made pollution is nearly un-debatable, then is it such a stretch to consider that this same pollution might be affecting global climate? In fact, we know it is. The only debate I can see is "How much?".

 

I didn't say it doesn't affect the climate. I'd think it most certainly has some effect. How much is debatable but why debate it? Pollution is bad and we should clean up our act no matter if it's effect on the climate is big or small.

[Essay]

The bottom line is this. Our planet has historically returned to a tropical environment time and time again after every plunge to an ice age. Over the life of the planet the average global temperature has been significantly higher than it is now and it is reasonable to believe it will repeat this pattern again. Natural global warming is real.

 

edit: Pollution includes habitat and biodiversity losses as well as the unusual amounts of foreign chemicals that we contribute to the system.

 

...with that said....

Climate change is a consequence of pollution! Focusing on CC is just another way of saying that we need to change the way we consume raw materials and produce wastes. To a physiscist, pollution is just a way of describing how we spew entropy into our box. To a chemist, pollution describes how the thermodynamic equilibrium is being pushed towards some other stable state, and biologists can see how a coevolved life/climate system will push off into some new trajectory as pollution rapidly changes the contributing bio/geo evolutionary subsystems.

 

Pollution is a focused definition for some local manifestation of our contribution to imbalancing the whole system. I agree that focusing on climate change may miss the ultimate cause of our problems, but it is the easiest way to galvanize a global response; it is the one symptom of pollution that affects everyone the most (and longest).

 

Climate is a focused definition for the state of the overall system and its trajectory. I agree pollution is bad, but not because of aesthetic reasons, personal health reasons, or concern for a particular species. Pollution is bad because cumulatively it disrupts the whole system and pushes it towards a new stable attractor (a new equilibrium or homeostasis).

===

 

Blooms of new lifeforms along the evolutionary ladder drastically altered the climate in the past. Do we think this latest bloom of "intelligent" life will be any different? The only question is how much difference will this bloom cause. We've been increasingly geoengineering the global system unintentionally for many millennia now. Perhaps we should begin re-engineering things now, with some intention, eh? Whether you call it cleaning up the front end, or stabilizing the back end, I think we're talking about the same thing here.

 

So what are some of those pollution-avoiding, climate-fixing ideas/solutions that you mentioned. Did I hear something about an electric hover car? We have another forum here, where that could get a lot of comments/reviews. Do you know of any "bio" solutions ...using algae or fungi? What about new geoengineering schemes ...or re-engineering some of our old schemes? Do you think cleaning up coal-generated electricity is possible?

===

 

edit:

Well, I see I'm just repeating what has just been said, more or less.

 

But C1ay: The overall geo-trend is one of cooling for the planet (life heats things up though) ...or it's the other way around, but they coevolve anyway to keep things habitable. But more importantly, there is no "pattern" as you suggest. It has been a succession of patterns, if anything; and we will create a new pattern (if we don't clean up and stabilize things better).

[freeztar]

I didn't say it doesn't affect the climate. I'd think it most certainly has some effect. How much is debatable but why debate it? Pollution is bad and we should clean up our act no matter if it's effect on the climate is big or small.

 

Well, I can't debate that.

[prometheuspan]

clay is so annoyed hes now stalkign me and provoking me in every other thread i am involved in.

 

this is unprofessional behavior, and, i do think its time i left and found a REAL science forum with admins

who actually you know... studied some moderation before becoming just another moderatorTROLL.

[prometheuspan]

It is just as ignorant to try and plot 2 points 20 years apart on a 4 billion year graph and project the outcome to some point in the future when the very data set used to plot that point has variables we don't even know of or understand yet.

 

The bottom line is this. Our planet has historically returned to a tropical environment time and time again after every plunge to an ice age. Over the life of the planet the average global temperature has been significantly higher than it is now and it is reasonable to believe it will repeat this pattern again. Natural global warming is real. The quantity of man's contribution is questionable and you can argue that until the moon turns blue, it will resolve nothing.

 

the problem with that argument is that such shifts happened over millions of years, not 20

or 100.

 

thats not a bottom line, its more propaganda from exxon.

OTOH, man's contribution to the pollution of the environment on the planet is hardly debatable. Man made pollution is man made pollution and no one can argue that it is anything else. It is an aspect of the global warming argument that both sides need to focus on and act on. Just because the planet is warming with or without our contribution is no reason for us to continue to piss in our own bathwater.

 

well thats mighty big of you.

 

i think thats my cue to leave.

 

I have decided that your not worth my time or energy and also, that I'm not even interested in telling people pro actively how screwed up this forum is.

 

Have a nice life.

 

bye.

[C1ay]

clay is so annoyed hes now stalkign me and provoking me in every other thread i am involved in.

 

this is unprofessional behavior, and, i do think its time i left and found a REAL science forum with admins

who actually you know... studied some moderation before becoming just another moderatorTROLL.

 

Haha... I don't seem to remember participating in your other threads. Perhaps you're mixed up.

 

i think thats my cue to leave.

bye.

 

Bye...

[Bored Wombat]

It is just as ignorant to try and plot 2 points 20 years apart on a 4 billion year graph and project the outcome to some point in the future when the very data set used to plot that point has variables we don't even know of or understand yet.

 

I'm missing the allusion again. Who did that?

 

The bottom line is this. Our planet has historically returned to a tropical environment time and time again after every plunge to an ice age. Over the life of the planet the average global temperature has been significantly higher than it is now and it is reasonable to believe it will repeat this pattern again.

Sure.

But there is also a much shorter term problem.

We have lost 30% of the world's population biodiversity in the last 35 years.

And climate change has contributed to that. (And in some areas is identifiably causal).

So it doesn't matter in terms of current policy what is likely to happen in a few hundred billion years. The concern is about what the world in which the current species of human lives.

 

Natural global warming is real.

 

Do you mean in the past?

 

Do you agree with Meehl et al above that currently we have a slow natural cooling?

 

The quantity of man's contribution is questionable and you can argue that until the moon turns blue, it will resolve nothing.

 

There's questionable and there's questionable. The best estimate is all of the current warming is anthropogenic. And we're 90% confident that most of it is anthropogenic.

 

OTOH, man's contribution to the pollution of the environment on the planet is hardly debatable. Man made pollution is man made pollution and no one can argue that it is anything else.

 

Fossil fuel CO2 is fossil fuel CO2 too. It is strongly depleted in C14 and C13 compared to other sources.

 

But certainly pollution is a significant threat to biodiversity along with climate change over-exploitation and habitat loss.

 

It is an aspect of the global warming argument that both sides need to focus on and act on. Just because the planet is warming with or without our contribution is no reason for us to continue to piss in our own bathwater.

 

Climate change, overexploitation and habitat loss also need to be focused on and acted on. Climate change is the trickiest in terms of getting people to act, because the costs of one's greenhouse emissions are distributed globally ... and impact mostly Sub-Saharan Africans.

[Rade]

Has anyone mentioned that the topic of "global warming" (which has morphed into "climate change") began ~1980 under the Thacher Conservative Party in the UK ? If you are old enough, you will recall that the previous 20 so years before 1980 the hot topic was "the glaciers are returning--next ice age around the corner".

 

Margaret Thacher had a degree in Chemistry, and her advisers thought it would be good for her to take a unique political stand on some global issue that she would know something about---global warming was a perfect fit. Not only was she a female, now an intelligent one at that, she understood science. Can you imagine how the male leaders of other countries would have been intimidated by a female that understood science ? And she was a very self confident female leader indeed (an Alpha Female in biological terms).

 

Of course, the secondary motivation for Thacher (perhaps not so secondary) was that the Conservative Party in UK in early 1980's was trying to outdo the Labor Party (surprise !), which had a big stake in coal mining (very much a Labor Party issue in UK). So, guess what happened ? Thacher began a debate that it was high time the UK began to look at the environmental impact of burning coal (all the air pollution, and, did you know the earth itself may be getting warmer because of it, etc. ?). Thus Thacher suggested that UK move swiftly into alternative sources of energy, especially nuclear (a darling of the Conservative Party), which was becoming very much accepted in nearby France. Now, history shows us little became of this new energy policy for UK--however--the global warming issue caught on like wildfire--many male leaders of countries took up the banner--including the American President Ronald Reagan. Alas, most of them, if not all, were scientifically illiterate, the norm for anyone interested in politics as a career choice (Thacher and Jimmy Carter two notable exceptions, with Carter having a degree in Nuclear Engineering from Naval Academy).

 

Ronald Reagan was very supportive of Thacher on most issues, being himself an ultra-conservative, however he could not push very hard on the issue of burning coal in United States, a Republican Party controlled industry, then and today. However, Reagan jumped on the Thacher UK Conservative Party bandwagon with the issue of ozone depletion. OK, not "global warming"--but part of a larger concern that we today call "global climate change". Thus, the issue of climate change in United States ironically had its start under the ultra conservative Reagan Republican Party administration (Greenpeace and the radical left had little to do with it). No President before Reagan (Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, etc.) had any significant national policy concerning global climate change--the Republican Party under Reagan changed all that (for the better I suggest). During the 1980's Reagan and the Congress passed major and significant new regulations on the release of ozone depleting chemicals, and 30 years latter the scientific data suggest it has been a partial success, the ozone hole has been getting smaller over time.

 

After his defeat in 2000, Al Gore took up the "global warming" issue. His motivation is complex, partly political, but I think partly scientific and philosophic--he had long interest in environmental issues. By 2000, global warming was becoming a hot topic--many world leaders were now on the band wagon. It has only been over the past ten years that the "science" has finally caught up the the "politics"--there is not scientific consensus on the issue (read all the previous posts on the thread topic).

 

My point is that the motivation for human concern about global warming since 1980 was politically motivated, not scientific. The issues of the science are very, very complex--about all that is "known" scientifically is that average CO2 levels for the earth have been raising continuously over the past ~60 years. Even those opposed to any actions against limits on CO2 do agree that the CO2 levels have been raising--their response is--who cares, no big deal, drill baby drill, burn coal baby burn coal.

 

My opinion is that the political issue of global warming has resulted in a significant positive effect on human behavior. Margaret Thacher should receive historical acclaim--even if the motivation was more political than scientific. Today, in 2010, more and more countries and technologies are moving away from burning of coal to supply energy to buildings, and turning away from burning oil for transportation. As a human value, this is a good action, for in the end the means will be justified due to improved human health and improved environment (air, water, land).

 

So, for those that believe "global warming" is a fake---sorry---it is too late. The question is not correct or incorrect--it is a non-question. The political game began by the UK Conservative Party in 1980 is over (internet science and talk show radio experts will not save the day for you). The world energy economy is rapidly moving toward the replacement of burning coal and oil. So, rather than spend time discussing this non-issue here, I suggest we start a new thread that lists the future potential stock market value of international companies that are moving forward with nuclear, wind, solar, auto battery, geothermal, etc. technologies. Time to shut-up already about "is global warming a fake" and make some $$ .

[CraigD]

Has anyone mentioned that the topic of "global warming" (which has morphed into "climate change") began ~1980 under the Thacher Conservative Party in the UK ? If you are old enough, you will recall that the previous 20 so years before 1980 the hot topic was "the glaciers are returning--next ice age around the corner".

Having the advantage of having been alive and in various senses politically active ca. 1980, I can recall of the cultural themes of “the approaching ice age” and “global warming” from that time, and a small view of the big, nebulous mix of scientific and philosophical positions that driving it. I’d not been conscious of Thatcher and the UK’s Conservative party’s role – thanks, Rade, for your detailed insights. :)

 

In the ‘80s, I was fairly immersed in SF fandom, so was aware of a peculiar combination of the two idea into a single cautionary (at best) or alarmist (at worst) catastrophy scenario: that anthropogenic global warming was unwittingly almost exactly counteracting the sudden onset of a global glaciation period, and that curtailing it would cause a disaster. Quoting from 1992’s Niven, Pournelle and Flynn novel Fallen Angels (available in its entirety here at the Bael free library):

That government, dedicated to saving the environment from the evils of technology, had been voted into power because everybody knew that the Green House Effect had to be controlled, whatever the cost. But who would have thought that the cost of ending pollution would include not only total government control of day-to-day life, but the onset of a new Ice Age?

As science goes, this scenario is ... well, good science fiction, but as a snapshot of a subculture, and by extension, the culture of its time, I find it revealing.

[Buffy]

Has anyone mentioned that the topic of "global warming" (which has morphed into "climate change") began ~1980 under the Thacher Conservative Party in the UK ? If you are old enough, you will recall that the previous 20 so years before 1980 the hot topic was "the glaciers are returning--next ice age around the corner".

...and as I've said many times previously here, there's actually good evidence based purely on statistical analysis of cycles of warming and cooling influences, that--all things being equal--we should be heading into an ice age about now...

 

...unfortunately of course, all things are not equal, and the fact that we have been heading toward ice age may have saved our rears in terms of giving us more time to react!

 

Imagine how bad it could be getting right now if we were heading into a natural warming cycle! :hihi:

 

Can you imagine how the male leaders of other countries would have been intimidated by a female that understood science ? And she was a very self confident female leader indeed (an Alpha Female in biological terms).

Maggie and Ronnie both had their weaknesses for Conservative Ideology, that while pinned in the US on Reagan, really came from Barry Goldwater: Government IS the problem.

 

While I have lots of arguments about Ronnie's weaknesses, one of the things I've always admired about him--and say a lot about how goshdarned *liberal* he was on some things (legalized abortion in California! How many social conservatives are in denial about *that* one?)--was that he treated Maggie like an equal and had no problem with the fact that she was a woman.

...Thacher began a debate that it was high time the UK began to look at the environmental impact of burning coal (all the air pollution, and, did you know the earth itself may be getting warmer because of it, etc. ?). Thus Thacher suggested that UK move swiftly into alternative sources of energy, especially nuclear (a darling of the Conservative Party), which was becoming very much accepted in nearby France.

Damned libtard tree hugger!

 

Since science and math have a well-known liberal bias, we can simply assume that all evidence of everything is wrong...unless it's supplied by the oil and gas and coal companies of course, so we shouldn't let arguments that are solely based on "trees are pretty" and "baby seals are cute" to make it so hard for corporations to maintain their profits, help the terrorists win!

 

Global warming fake, peak oil fake, deforestation fake, biodiversity crash fake...yep anything that prevents corporate supremacy is bad. Not even Maggie or Ronnie believed that, and yet, this is precisely what is killing our political systems:

The entire structure of Keynesian economics relies on government's healthy distrust of the excesses of the private sector. A corporation's job is to make money for its shareholders. Under ideal circumstances, that financial success will be driven by innovation and the provision of the best product at the best value, thus leading to an intersection between the best interests of the corporation and the best interests of the public. But we do not live in an ideal world.

 

Instead, we live in a world governed by whether transnational companies managed to meet Wall Street analysts' anticipations about their quarterly profit reports--and if that massive profit for some reason happened to fall a few million short of expectations, then savvy investors will go find some company that is actually meeting them in the hopes of getting a better rate of return--and delivering a hit to the "failed" company's all-important stock price. Given the simple pressures involved in the expectations of profit, it is structurally unreasonable to expect that any large corporation will be a rational actor in the longer term. This should have become obvious as a result of the financial crisis, when it became clear that the behemoths of the financial sector did not even have their own long-term health in mind if there was shorter-term profit to be exploited.

 

The very nature of modern capitalism has made long-term thinking and contingency planning counterproductive, especially when the top-level officials who ought to be held responsible for catastrophic failures seldom receive any stringent punishment for profit-motivated decisions that adversely affect the lives of millions. It behooves all of our political leaders never to assume that any large corporation has given any thought whatsoever to how it will mitigate the effects of shortsighted decisions motivated by nothing but profit.

 

Large corporations have proven they cannot be trusted to be rational actors and team players. Their only purpose is to make money. The government's job is to protect its citizens--and that means never assuming that any corporation will ever do what it ought to unless--to use a controversial phrase--the government has its boot on that corporation's neck. Just like the financial crisis, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico represents nothing short of a total failure of the ideology that free markets can be counted on to police themselves.

 

The question is, do we have the wherewithal as nations to resist this. We have ceded control of most of our political institutions to transnational corporate control, and they are working hard at the science establishment too.

 

What's the answer?

 

The world energy economy is rapidly moving toward the replacement of burning coal and oil. So, rather than spend time discussing this non-issue here, I suggest we start a new thread that lists the future potential stock market value of international companies that are moving forward with nuclear, wind, solar, auto battery, geothermal, etc. technologies. Time to shut-up already about "is global warming a fake" and make some $$ .

 

Anyone who's read my past posts on this topic knows that I think that corporations that are not investing in New Energy Technologies are dinosaurs that are doomed to fail. But as the quote I provided above indicates, in fact these organizations are in fact behaving rationally because they have absolutely no motivation to pay attention to anything but the current quarter's profits. (there's a long topic here about how incentives for management have shifted in recent years to align themselves with short-term investor goals, in spite of all the effort to make those packages long-term 20 years ago precisely to combat this sort of long-term corporate failure...but that's another thread....)

 

The key here is in that quote: it's really government's job to be "liberal anti-corporate socialists" in two key respects:

1. New technologies *always* need government funding to get them to the point where they are "competitive". Biofuels are not there yet, hydrogen and battery technology suffer both from technology and distribution network barriers. While yes, the conservatives can harp on the weakness of this (oddly enough, best shown with the wasteful subsidies for corn-based ethanol that conservatives--corn growing states!--love), no major shift happens without this leadership.
   
2. Maintenance of real markets with real competition and full accountability, where there is recognition of the need for strong anti-trust law that prevent giant transnational corporations with few competitors from creating failed, non-competitive markets with skewed prices, stopping the active destruction of competing technologies through predatory competitive practices and acquisitions, and the end of wrist-slap penalties and "motivation to create disaster" limits on liability.

 

And the key to all of this is to make sure that the last piece of the puzzle keeps working: the ability for both information and communications to *allow* open, real, and honest discourse on the most critical issues our world faces today.

 

Unfortunately, that is--because of both political and corporate pressure--under siege. Here's a book you might want to look at:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people can change the world."

-- Margaret Mead

 

Because Americans are optimists we tend to see Mead's observation as upbeat and life-affirming (as it was probably intended). Blinkered by optimism, however, we miss the dark flip side of her observation -- that a few fanatics can do immense harm.

 

Book cover. In their sweeping and comprehensive new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erick M. Conway document how a handful of right-wing ideologues -- all scientists -- have (mis)shaped U.S. policy for decades, delaying government action on life-and-death issues from cigarettes and second-hand smoke, to acid rain, and now, finally, to climate change. The book is similar to the popular Discovery Channel show "How Do They Do It?" Only instead of investigating quirky mysteries like how stripes get into toothpaste, Merchants of Doubt looks at exactly how we arrived at the gravest crisis in the history of our species -- one we created ourselves.

 

Although most of these scientists were influential men in themselves (and they are all men), they could not have done as much damage without powerful allies. Whole industries bankrolled their research, sometimes laundering the money through front groups with innocuous names. Think tanks like the George C. Marshall Institute were financed specifically to publish and disseminate their papers -- junk science that couldn't survive the rigors of peer-reviewed journals. Oreskes and Conway also devote an insightful section to the mass media's mostly unwitting complicity in this scandal.

 

This premise may sound like a conspiracy theory, but the truth Oreskes and Conway elucidate is more banal and convincing. The title, Merchants of Doubt, frames the authors' argument, echoing an internal memo from the Brown & Williamson tobacco company that declared: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public." Big tobacco helped finance the industry of doubt in its modern form, run by the scientists whose schemes this book details.

 

Amazon.com: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (9781596916104): Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway, Erik Conway: Books http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596916109

 

This is quite a mess, and the "junk science" that best describes "global warming is fake" is our worst enemy because it is a prime example for how manipulated we are as a society to benefit current quarter corporate profits at the expense of our very survival.

 

Who's going to win? That depends on what you do in the voting booth and how often you call your representatives to complain, folks....

 

Whatever you do, do it to the purpose; do it thoroughly, not superficially. Go to the bottom of things. Any thing half done, or half known, is in my mind, neither done nor known at all. Nay, worse, for it often misleads, :naughty:

Buffy

[Bored Wombat]

Has anyone mentioned that the topic of "global warming" (which has morphed into "climate change") began ~1980 under the Thacher Conservative Party in the UK ?

 

No, mate.

 

It goes back over 100 years.

 

There was some good work done on it between the wars, estimates of climates response to increase in CO2 started then, and motivated Keeling's work on atmospheric CO2 measurement, who set up the observation station in Hawaii, from where there are continuous measurements going back to the 1950s.

 

If you are old enough, you will recall that the previous 20 so years before 1980 the hot topic was "the glaciers are returning--next ice age around the corner."

 

That view made the papers, but it was very much a minor view in the scientific literature.

 

(see THE MYTH OF THE 1970S GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS). Bottom line, the papers predicting cooling were outnumbered by those predicting warming by 6 to 1.

[Rade]

No, mate. It goes back over 100 years.....(see THE MYTH OF THE 1970S GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS). Bottom line, the papers predicting cooling were outnumbered by those predicting warming by 6 to 1.

OK, thank you very much for the reference. I think I did not make myself clear--of course there was research being done before M.Thacher was elected--but that was it--it was a topic within science--it had not become political. And of course cooling vs warming back then may have been 6: 1 science journals in favor of warming, but it also likely it was 6:1 in the news media in favor of cooling (much more exciting to report that a glacier will be in your back yard soon, than to report more photon energy from the sun--sells more papers I would think).

 

The first sentence of the paper you cite is this:

 

Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

And that is the point of my post--until the late 1970's-early 1980 (when M.Thacher came to power) what we call climate science did not exist. It was the Conservative Party in UK that pushed the "science" into "politics" and that event pushed the science forward leaps and bounds. And here we are today (2010)--much better for it because burning coal and oil in 100 years will almost be non-existent on the earth as a way to create energy.

[Bored Wombat]

It was the Conservative Party in UK that pushed the "science" into "politics" and that event pushed the science forward leaps and bounds.

Computers helped too. As did Keeling's data on atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

 

And not all the research was done in the UK. The Americans and the French helped.

 

And here we are today (2010)--much better for it because burning coal and oil in 100 years will almost be non-existent on the earth as a way to create energy.

 

One hopes.

[Fletcher]

Global warming is a scientific certainty, it's governed by the laws of physics and there's nothing we can do to change that. Any denial of this is just an expression of ignorance.

 

It's certainly true that there's a lot of confusion about global warming and that many of the stories you read in the media are sensationalist. There’s also an ongoing propaganda campaign fuelled by global warming deniers and to this end they have invented any number of excuses as to why global warming is fake. They never attempt to disprove the scientific theory because they can’t, so they just invent an alternative one instead.

 

Look at the facts – the ones that can be demonstrated and proven to be correct.

EDIt: spam-link removed

[FICAT10N]

This was in the news today. I think that there are a lot of different variables in the equation but I would like to be on the safe side.

 

washingtonpost.com

[richard tj]

I wasn't aware that CO2 doesn't store IR energy as effectively as H2O. No wonder we have global warming. Imagine, all that heat/ infra red plunging through the atmosphere 24/7, only to heat water, which covers 70% of the planet. Then, on the night side, with the raised CO2 level, it's trapped becuase it can't radiate out through the CO2 into the atmosphere.

 

Richard

 

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[CraigD]

Hi, Richard. Though you’re not truly new to hypography, I’ve not replied to a post of yours before now, so a belated welcome! :)

I wasn't aware that CO2 doesn't store IR energy as effectively as H2O.

The effect of [ce]CO_2[/ce], and other atmosphereic gasses on global temperature is not due to their storing heat (strictly speaking, not “IR energy”, since once a gas molecules have absorbed photons of infrared and other light, the energy is in the form of kinetic (movment) energy of and within the molecules), but due to their reflecting –absorbing and immediately re-emitting - infrared light emitted by the Earth’s surface land and water.

 

Several gases, such as , [ce]CH_4[/ce] (methane), [ce]N_2O[/ce] (nitrous), and chlorofluorocarbons such as [ce]CCl_2F_2[/ce] are many times more heat-trapping per molecule than [ce]CO_2[/ce], but exist in much lower concentrations, so contribute less to the atmosphere’s total heat-trapping effect. [ce]H_2O[/ce] exists in high atmospheric concentration, but because it can also for clouds which are strongly reflective of incoming light, and its concentration and form varies greatly with temperature and other factors, it’s difficult to assign a simple value to its heat-trapping effect. The wikipedia article greenhouse gas and this skepticalscience page have more detailed info about this.

 

Although liquid water on the Earth’s surface stores a lot of heat, compared to the constant influx of heating sunlight, it’s not significant.