A couple months ago, my family and I enjoyed a terrific week of vacation in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Eastern Tennessee. Part of that trip included a couple days at Dollywood, which is a very fun theme park to see if you’ve got the time.
The first day we were there, being it’s the deep South in the middle of summer, it was a little steamy out. Air temperatures were in the high 80s to low 90s, as was the humidity. By the time the afternoon hit, something to do that was both shady and requiring us to sit down was very appealing. So we hopped on the train that tours the park and surrounding hillside for about half an hour.
We sat in the coach car just in front of the caboose, and a funny thing happened about 10 minutes into the ride. Little black specks started appearing on all of our clothes, arms, hair, and in our teeth. My step-daughter was not amused. She had no idea that she was riding on a coal-powered locomotive, and that the soot was the natural fallout of such a propulsion system, or that people routinely dealt with it back in the day. She just wanted to go take a shower and clean it off.
She has ridden trains in the past. She’s been on Amtrak several times, which are run by diesel-electric locomotives. The diesel engines provide the massive amounts of current onboard necessary for the electric drivetrain motors to turn the wheels. She’s also been on the train that circles Disneyland many times, a scaled-down, steam-powered train. That just emits water vapor. That’s a lot cleaner, right? Nah. Meet the new goalpost on greenhouse gases and climate change – H2O.
Do any cursory look on the internet for the top global emitters of greenhouse gas, and you’ll get rankings and data for CO2 emissions, maybe methane, and possibly nitrous oxide. So science measures the essential ingredient for plant life to make the oxygen we need to survive, cow flatulence, and laughing gas all as bad things, and that we have to cease all the modern comforts of life immediately – not in four year, not in ten years, but right damn now or else we’re going to increase the average temperature of the globe by a degree and we’re all dead. You think I’m kidding. Here’s Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley.
He’s slamming Joe Biden for not doing enough to take cars off the street, close down power plants, literally return to the stone age immediately. Never mind the fact that the podcast he’s on with the Washington Post is made possible because of electricity generated by burning of fossil fuels, and the clothes he is wearing are made internationally on machinery that is powered by coal-fired power plants coming online every couple weeks.
Joe Biden just flew on Air Force One, a custom, tricked-out 747, from D.C. to Arizona, and then rode in a huge motorcade, every vehicle burning gas, many of which are extra-heavy, less fuel efficient beasts due to armor plating, bulletproof glass and other modifications, creating a huge dust cloud upon his arrival to the Grand Canyon to give a speech on the environment.
Biden then sat at the rim of the 9th wonder of the world for an interview with the Weather Channel, no doubt carefully choreographed by Rep. Daniel Goldman to demonstrate it’s the subject Biden talks about all the time, even with Ukrainian oligarchs he’s dining with who also happen to be paying millions to his coke-addled pedophile son. In this interview, Biden made the claim that even though the courts said his actions were illegal, he’s still bound and determine to stop drilling for oil.
So let’s give all the climate hysteria people their premise. Fossil fuels cause CO2 to be pumped into the air, causes global warming, or global cooling, or climate change. Whatever the actual condition of the climate, it’s all because of what we are doing or not doing, and only the progressive left should be put in control of what we can drive or not drive, where we can move, where we live, all of it. Now to be certain, I don’t believe in any of this nonsense at all, but for the sake of the argument, let the climate zealots have their wish. We go to Climate zero emissions tomorrow. What would change? Not a damn thing.
In the past few weeks alone, ocean temperatures have been the latest arrow in the quiver of the climate acolytes. Headlines screamed out, “The oceans are boiling” Naturally, it was because of your gas stove or your insufferable demand to use air conditioning. But what is causing the ocean temperature to rise? Is it us? Nope. Blame Ursula, the sea witch.
Three-quarters of the globe is covered with water. So it stands to reason that three-quarters of the globe’s volcanic activity is underwater. Usually, these eruptions are miles deep and go undetected, unless you’re a fish. Then, it can be problematic. But other times, like in Tonga last year, underwater volcanic activity can very much be a thing.
🌋 HUNGA TONGA-HUNGA
UNDERWATER VOLCANO ERUPTION
15th January 2022
Watch til the very end… https://t.co/nCwzFPDP2N pic.twitter.com/GP7FnztbzE— Robin Monotti (@robinmonotti) August 5, 2023
Originally, it was thought that the volcanic blast, the most powerful detonation ever recorded on Earth, sent around 50 teragrams (one teragram is a trillion grams) of water vapor – steam – H2O, into the atmosphere. It’s easy enough to comprehend that if the Earth releases countless metric tons of molten lava into the ocean, it’s going to do two things. It’s going to heat up the water around it, and it’s going to throw steam into the air. What do I care? It’s water. That’s what makes clouds. Clouds make rain. Rain makes corn. Corn makes whiskey. I learned this all from Luke Bryan. Rain is a good thing.
But after a year of nonstop eruption of the Tongan volcano, and science consulting the instant replay cameras in New York, upon further review, the data shows that 149 teragrams of water vapor were released into the atmosphere. They missed their estimates by three orders of magnitude. That’s a lot of water up in the air. But it’s still water, so what’s the harm, right? Wrong.
While John Kerry, Al Gore, Joe Biden and the Marxists that populate the climate change church continue to scare you out of your cars, gas stoves and air conditioning, the 800-pound gorilla in the greenhouse gas world isn’t carbon. It’s not methane. It’s not nitrous oxide. And it’s not really anything we humans can do anything about. It’s water vapor.
MIT republished a Los Angeles Times story by Dean Kuipers well over a decade ago with some hard truths about causes for climate change.
Several readers pointed out an omission in last week’s post about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s release of its Annual Greenhouse Gas Index, which showed that man-made gases that contribute to global warming continued a steady rise. The post -– and the AGGI –- mentioned carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other gases, but failed to mention the biggest contributor to global warming: plain old water vapor.
“I want to comment that the way-dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is not mentioned, namely water vapor,” writes Ken Saunders of Pacific Palisades. “Water vapor accounts for about 97 percent of the total (natural plus man-emitted) greenhouse warming of the planet. See, e.g., John Houghton’s ‘The Physics of Atmospheres, 3rd edition,’ Cambridge University Press, 2002.”
97%, you say? So my burning a gas stove, driving to work in my gasoline-powered truck, and keeping the air conditioning set at the radio studio to 68 degrees in order to keep the computers and other electrical equipment from overheating isn’t really a problem. If you actually run the numbers, more or less, my personal contribution per capita to climate change comes out to one seven-billionth of three percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s say I’m a selfish pig and am using a hundred times my allotted share of pollutants. As a greenhouse gas glutton, I’d still only be responsible for one seventy-millionth of three percent of global emissions. If you’re a numbers person, my gluttony giving John Kerry angst is .000000014285714. Even if all 7 billion people on Earth go to net zero tomorrow, 97% of greenhouse gases will continue to be pumped into the air because of volcanic and other natural causes. Why hasn’t science and the alarmists banned water, or at least treated it as the mother of all pollutants it apparently is? Lots of reasons.
It doesn’t fit the narrative. It’s hard to claim climate change is the reason we have droughts, droughts being bad and all, and that we desperately need rainfall for everything on Earth to live and thrive, only to discover that the very stuff that forms the clouds that eventually causes the rain we so want and need is caused by the chief contributor to climate change that is so bad in the first place.
Science won’t even call water vapor a pollutant. It’s called a greenhouse gas. Even science can’t go to the absurd level and call water vapor a pollutant. Imagine what progressives would do with water, not Flint water, not acid rain, but just plain water now being toxic? Forget about progressives in Washington taking away your gas stove. They’re going to be coming for your humidifiers and irons, too? No more boiling water for tea? Heck, boiling water is supposed to purify it for drinking. What if you can no longer boil it because of the vapor released into the air?
Too much water vapor at higher altitudes, science says, retains radiated heat from the Earth, preventing it from leaking out into space. And that captured, floating, radiated heat inside water vapor stays there a long time, apparently, and science doesn’t know what to do about it. Or so says the MIT people. Except that the air temperature at higher elevations is below freezing. If you take a plane ride anywhere, even at 30,000 feet, the outside air temperature is well below zero. The water vapor floating all around you will eventually cool. And when it does, it will condense. Into clouds. Clouds get heavy and dense with water, and eventually release their contents as rain, snow, hail, and sleet.
The Tonga volcano is expected to be active for up to another three years. And just this past week, scientists discovered three more active underwater volcanos off the coast of Italy. And that’s the ones we now know about. There are almost certainly have to be more out lurking below the surface undetected, heating up the water around them, producing water vapor.
So why haven’t we done anything about runaway steam? Back to the MIT/L.A. Times article.
This is true, water vapor is the major player in the greenhouse effect and is often omitted from reports and reporting about global warming -– mostly because it is more of a symptom than a cause in global climate change, and cannot be easily mitigated.
Tom Boden, director of the U.S. Energy Department’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, acknowledges in an email: “Folks are right when they state water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas and not routinely measured directly in the atmosphere. Atmospheric water vapor is difficult to measure, highly reactive, and variable in amount due to meteorological conditions (i.e., atmospheric water vapor is continuously being generated from evaporation and continuously removed by condensation).”
“Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas and natural levels of [carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide] are also crucial to creating a habitable planet,” writes John Reilly, professor at MIT and co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Center for Environmental Policy Research, in an email.
That idea leads many to believe that global warming is natural and cannot be affected much by human activity. Reader Roy W. Rising of Valley Village writes: “Today’s report focuses on a bundle of gases that comprise a very small part of total of ‘greenhouse’ gases. It totally disregards the long-known fact that about 95% of all ‘greenhouse’ gases is WATER VAPOR! Spending billions of dollars to alter a few components of the 5% won’t affect the natural course of climate change.”
Just today, in Southern California, it was 82 degrees. In August. That’s actually a little cooler than normal. My wife and I went to dinner and then to a movie in an air-conditioned theater. I was telling her about the Tonga volcano’s output and how the alarmists are ignoring the largest single contributor to any significant warming going on, because nothing can be done about it and doesn’t serve to promote their climate agenda. We both noticed that gathering overhead while we were talking about this very subject were a significant number of opaque, atmospheric, volcanic water vapor-infused condensation fields. By the time we got to the restaurant and sat down, we looked outside and saw a brief weather event that is the result of Earth’s gravitational pull on this particular collection of Tongan condensed water pollutants gathered overhead. We were pleased that the Earth seemed to be healing itself with the rainfall. It sort of was a cathartic feeling, like global warming bloodletting…that is, until after the rain event ended and the sun shone brightly again out of the western half of the sky, quickly evaporating the Tongan street water everywhere into water vapor again.
Curse this changing climate and its almost endless cyclical ability to self-correct.
