Ladywriter
October 17th, 2007, 09:18 AM
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21223500/
WASHINGTON - The world isn’t just getting hotter from global warming (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21223500/#), it’s getting stickier. It really is the humidity.The amount of moisture in the air near the surface — the stuff that makes hot weather unbearable — increased 2.2 percent in just under three decades. And computer models show that the only explanation is manmade global warming, according to a study published in Thursday’s journal Nature.
To show that this is manmade, Gillett ran computer models to simulate past climate conditions and studied what would happen to humidity if there were no manmade greenhouse gases. It didn’t match reality.
He looked at what would happen from just manmade greenhouse gases. That didn’t match either. Then he looked at the combination of natural conditions and greenhouse gases. The results were nearly identical to the year-by-year increases in humidity.
Gillett’s study followed another last month that used the same technique to show that moisture above the world’s oceans increased and that it bore the “fingerprint” of being caused by manmade global warming.
Climate scientists have now seen the manmade fingerprint of global warming on 10 different aspects of Earth’s environment: surface temperatures, humidity, water vapor over the oceans, barometric pressure, total precipitation, wildfires, change in species of plants in animals, water run-off, temperatures in the upper atmosphere, and heat content in the world’s oceans.
It will only feel worse in the future, Gillett said. Moisture in the air increases by about 6 percent with every degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), he said. Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21223500/#) projections for temperature increases, that would mean a 12 to 24 percent increase in humidity by the year 2100.
damn....
WASHINGTON - The world isn’t just getting hotter from global warming (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21223500/#), it’s getting stickier. It really is the humidity.The amount of moisture in the air near the surface — the stuff that makes hot weather unbearable — increased 2.2 percent in just under three decades. And computer models show that the only explanation is manmade global warming, according to a study published in Thursday’s journal Nature.
To show that this is manmade, Gillett ran computer models to simulate past climate conditions and studied what would happen to humidity if there were no manmade greenhouse gases. It didn’t match reality.
He looked at what would happen from just manmade greenhouse gases. That didn’t match either. Then he looked at the combination of natural conditions and greenhouse gases. The results were nearly identical to the year-by-year increases in humidity.
Gillett’s study followed another last month that used the same technique to show that moisture above the world’s oceans increased and that it bore the “fingerprint” of being caused by manmade global warming.
Climate scientists have now seen the manmade fingerprint of global warming on 10 different aspects of Earth’s environment: surface temperatures, humidity, water vapor over the oceans, barometric pressure, total precipitation, wildfires, change in species of plants in animals, water run-off, temperatures in the upper atmosphere, and heat content in the world’s oceans.
It will only feel worse in the future, Gillett said. Moisture in the air increases by about 6 percent with every degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), he said. Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21223500/#) projections for temperature increases, that would mean a 12 to 24 percent increase in humidity by the year 2100.
damn....