Sunday, May 22, 2016

Greenhouse gas is not a bad word.

Greenhouse gases are benevolent. Where greenhouse gases become a concern is when there is too much of them to trap infrared energy resulting in heat.

Water mitigates the climate that greenhouse gases create. The more greenhouse gases in the troposphere of Earth, the greater the need for mitigation of the heat by water vapor.

Of the phases of water, it is vapor that is the last phase to accept heat from the troposphere. That has been a good thing. Water vapor not only exists because of the Earth's infrared heat, it also acts to move water around to provide rain and seasons. Under a normal troposphere seasonal changes are also mitigate to allow a wide spread distribution of that heat rather than a concentrated amount of heat from solar rays. It is a matter of surface area. Water vapor accepts Earth's heat and then builds into clouds that travel around the Earth to bring rain and shade.

Today, everyone age of 15 years old remembers less turbulence and a more benevolent climate. Today, water vapor continues to receive heat and turns it into physical wind and rain, etc., with far more ferocity.

I believe the best concept to understand this from a scientific view is "The Mechanical Equivalent of Heat." (click here) It is the relationship of heat and work. It has a formula of J (joule) = W (work) / Q (heat). The equation works in both directions, hence the equal sign. It is an equation within theromodynamics.

The heat is the ever growing greenhouse gas infrared heat. The work is that of the water vapor cloud system that mitigates the heat. And the joule is the understood energy used in the mitigation in the climate.

In a climate model which reflects the increasing heat and water vapor the joule would be an indication of how different the climate is compared to 150 years ago. Water vapor due to it's properties effects change (mitigation of heat) in motion.

Example: How many joules are produced by a tornado? Tornadoes result from heat mitigated by water vapor or lack there of. Hurricanes are the same way. Due to the dynamics of Earth, hurricanes have a vector.

But, that is the relationship of water to global warming. It mitigates the heat as it has within a far more 'normal' troposphere, but, with greater indications of energy due to higher infrared heat trapped by ever increasing greenhouse gases the result in no longer benevolent.

God and Global Warming

On a journey through Alaska, can Evangelicals and scientists find common ground? (click here)

The fears verbalized in this film are profound. The people involved have found information and experience a far better answer than fear.

Lack of knowledge regarding such a dangerous time with Earth it creates fear and denial. I strongly believe when people don't understand their world, they tend to reject the truth and cling to fear of the truth.

I thought a diagram of water may help to understand it's greenhouse gas properties.

The other greenhouse gases are very stable molecules. While water is a stable molecule, it is also highly reactive as a partially charged structure.

Water has a bent structure as noted below. It has to hydrogens that are bonded to a single oxygen through shared electrons as noted above. The bend in the molecule allows for water to have a PARTIAL positive charge on the oxygen side and a PARTIAL negative charge on the hydrogen side. This partial positive or negative provides enough reason for other molecules to interact with it.

The point is water is a greenhouse gas because it can mitigate the heat. As the other greenhouse gases turn photon light from the sun to infrared warming heat from Earth's surface, water is available to receive that heat and become weather.

Remember, weather is always changing, but, the climate is suppose to remain stable. This episode of warming is dangerous because it is abrupt climate change. It may not seem abrupt because it is taking place over 150 years, but, on Earth's timeline that is a very short time. Abrupt climate change destroys life as it cannot adapt in such short periods of time. This is also different in that the source of greenhouse gases seem infinite. Infinite sources of greenhouse gases makes the final outcome of Earth unknown. The BURNING and manufacture of these gases is a far different method of Earth's experience with greenhouse gases before the Industrial Revolution.

But, as to water, for all it's incredible properties that keeps life happening in Earth, it's property of 'temperature-phase' change is where it fits into this classification as a greenhouse gas.

"Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains

Science Advances is a new journal by the familiar Science magazine. The Southwest and Central Plains of the USA are very important places where American agriculture is a vital part of global food distribution. Those areas of the country also receive their water from "snowpack."


Science Advances, 12 February 2015 (click here)
Vol. 1, No. 1

By Benjamin J. Cook, Toby R. Ault, and Jason E. Smerdon

Abstract:

In the Southwest and Central Plains of Western North America, climate change is expected to increase drought severity in the coming decades. These regions nevertheless experienced extended Medieval-era droughts that were more persistent than any historical event, providing crucial targets in the paleoclimate record for benchmarking the severity of future drought risks. We use an empirical drought reconstruction and three soil moisture metrics from 17 state-of-the-art general circulation models to show that these models project significantly drier conditions in the later half of the 21st century compared to the 20th century and earlier paleoclimatic intervals. This desiccation is consistent across most of the models and moisture balance variables, indicating a coherent and robust drying response to warming despite the diversity of models and metrics analyzed. Notably, future drought risk will likely exceed even the driest centuries of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (1100–1300 CE) in both moderate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) future emissions scenarios, leading to unprecedented drought conditions during the last millennium.

Water, under normal conditions, has a cycle. It is a clsoed cycle, under normal conditions. One has to understand and respect what is normal to know how far astray we are from it.

The water cycle has no starting point, but we'll begin in the oceans, since that is where most of Earth's water exists. The sun, which drives the water cycle, heats water in the oceans. Some of it evaporates as vapor into the air; a relatively smaller amount of moisture is added as ice and snow sublimate directly from the solid state into vapor. Rising air currents take the vapor up into the atmosphere, along with water from evapotranspiration, which is water transpired from plants and evaporated from the soil. The vapor rises into the air where cooler temperatures cause it to condense into clouds.

Air currents move clouds around the globe, and cloud particles collide, grow, and fall out of the sky as precipitation. Some precipitation falls as snow and can accumulate as ice caps and glaciers, which can store frozen water for thousands of years. Snowpacks in warmer climates often thaw and melt when spring arrives, and the melted water flows overland as snowmelt. Most precipitation falls back into the oceans or onto land, where, due to gravity, the precipitation flows over the ground as surface runoff. A portion of runoff enters rivers in valleys in the landscape, with streamflow moving water towards the oceans. Runoff, and groundwater seepage, accumulate and are stored as freshwater in lakes.

Not all runoff flows into rivers, though. Much of it soaks into the ground as infiltration. Some of the water infiltrates into the ground and replenishes aquifers (saturated subsurface rock), which store huge amounts of freshwater for long periods of time. Some infiltration stays close to the land surface and can seep back into surface-water bodies (and the ocean) as groundwater discharge, and some groundwater finds openings in the land surface and emerges as freshwater springs. Yet more groundwater is absorbed by plant roots to end up as evapotranspiration from the leaves. Over time, though, all of this water keeps moving, some to reenter the ocean, where the water cycle "ends" ... oops - I mean, where it "begins."...
May 22, 2016
By NPR Staff

Villagers throw containers into a well to collect their daily supply of potable water after a tanker made its daily delivery in Shahapur, India on May 13, 2016. India is in the midst of a drought.

We often associate climate change with too much water (click here) — the melting ice caps triggering a rise in sea levels. But a new World Bank report says that it's too little water — the potable sort — that we also need to think about.
High and Dry: Climate Change, Water, and the Economy examines the future effects of diminishing water supplies on the world. "Water-related climate risks cascade through food, energy, urban, and environmental systems," researchers write. "Growing populations, rising incomes, and expanding cities will converge upon a world where the demand for water rises exponentially, while supply becomes more erratic and uncertain."
The World Bank says that in areas where water is readily available, like Central Africa and East Asia, it could become harder to find. And in areas like the Middle East, already facing water problems, "scarcity will greatly worsen."
The authors also note the spikes in food prices a water shortage would cause, which in turn would likely lead to conflict.
These are all fairly evident consequences of global warming. The report treads new ground, however, in evaluating the economic impacts of this water scarcity. Researchers say water shortages could cause certain areas to lose as much as 6 percent of their gross domestic product "as a result of water-related losses in agriculture, health, income, and property."...

Water is considered the "universal solvent."

Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. Water effects every living thing on earth.

Did you get that?

Water effects every living thing on Earth.

Are you sure you got that?

Water effects every living thing on Earth.

Now that you 'got it,' realize the one true body system in the human body that does most of the work regarding water.

...Our own kidneys and water's solvent properties (click here) make a great pair in keeping us alive and healthy. The kidneys are responsible for filtering out substances that enter our bodies from the foods and drinks we consume. But, the kidneys have got to get rid of these substances after they accumulate them. That is where water helps out; being such a great solvent, water washing through the kidneys dissolves these substances and sends them on the way out of our bodies....


Ocean acidification seems like such a remote problem from everyday life. Ocean acidification is happening now. Where? Oregon, USA.


Realize the range of water and it's phase changes.



This is a fairly simple chart of the "Phases of Water."

The most common phase of water is liquid. It is what most people think of when water is discussed. We cook with it. We bath in it. We drink it.

The temperature of liquid water is between and not including 0 degrees Celsius (C) and 100 degrees Celsius. Or. 32 degrees Fahrenheit (F) to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

The next phase most people think of is solid. Ice. Ice forms when temperatures reach below 32 F or 0 C.

The least appreciated phase of water is greater than 212 F or greater than 100 C. This is water vapor.

Water also has weight which for a gallon of room temperature water (liquid phase) weighs 8.33 pounds.

Two of the phases mentioned in the diagram not yet discussed is sublimation and deposition.

Sublimation is when water is solid and immediately turns to water vapor without going through a liquid phase

Deposition is when water goes through a phase change of gas to solid without going through a liquid phase.

All these phases of water occur on Earth.

May 20, 2016
By Bruce Finley

Global warming (click here) may be taking a toll on human lives, such as low-income farmers in hot, rural tropical regions, Colorado-based scientists have found.
The problem is dehydration, which leads to kidney problems. Kidneys filter toxins and other waste out of blood.
"There's warming in the same areas where we're seeing kidney disease increases," said Henry Diaz, a longtime National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate scientist who co-authored a study published this week.
"We want to bring this to the attention of the scientific community, as well as the public, that there may be a connection between climate and health conditions — kidney disease in tropical areas where the high temperatures have been increasing relatively fast," Diaz said.
The World Health Organization and other international institutions for years have warned that climate change could threaten people, largely through disease spread by insects such as mosquitoes. And extreme weather such as heat waves and floods leads to emergency-room visits and deaths. But this study by scientists at the University of Colorado, NOAA and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ranks among the first to make a connection between global warming and a particular health condition.
The scientists focused on areas where weather data show maximum temperatures increasing and gathered health data on kidney disease and deaths....
H20

From USGS:

Looking at water, (click here) you might think that it's the most simple thing around. Pure water is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. But it's not at all simple and plain and it is vital for all life on Earth. Where there is water there is life, and where water is scarce, life has to struggle or just "throw in the towel."

In accepting the vital link of water to life there are some essential understandings of a relationship. The vital relationship life has to Earth is defined with water.

Think of what you need to survive, really just survive. (click here) Food? Water? Air? Facebook? Naturally, I'm going to concentrate on water here. Water is of major importance to all living things; in some organisms, up to 90% of their body weight comes from water. Up to 60% of the human adult body is water.


According to H.H. Mitchell, Journal of Biological Chemistry 158, the brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. The skin contains 64% water, muscles and kidneys are 79%, and even the bones are watery: 31%.

Each day humans must consume a certain amount of water to survive. Of course, this varies according to age and gender, and also by where someone lives. Generally, an adult male needs about 3 liters per day while an adult female needs about 2.2 liters per day. Some of this water is gotten in food....
It's Sunday Night

The Annex A list of greenhouse gases if finally complete according to the Kyoto Protocol.

There is one more gas the USA recognizes as a greenhouse gas not listed in Kyoto Protocol, water. Without water the greenhouse gases that warm Earth is basically worthless. Water in combination with greenhouse gases is why life exists on Earth. The USA agencies recognize water because it is the prime driver of heat distribution on Earth.

"Water" by Pentatonix (click here for official site - thank you)

It's ten past two, still up thinking of you
If I showed you all I really want to
Would you stay, then push me away
I just can't return anymore

Timid heart, hide my scars
Make me stronger

I can't take this any longer
I need, I need you like water
It's on the tip of my tongue
I'm not asking for much
Just your love and not another
'Cause your embrace keeps me warmer
Could I tell you this time
How I wish you were mine

My voice cracks, I wait for it to pass
Heart beats fast and words I can't take back
And so I pray I don't drive you away
'Cause I'm scared of what I have to tell you

Timid heart, hide my scars
Make me stronger

I can't take this any longer
I need, I need you like water
It's on the tip of my tongue
I'm not asking for much
Just your love and not another
'Cause your embrace keeps me warmer
Could I tell you this time
How I wish you were mine

I'll take you higher, take you high
I can make you come alive
Open your eyes, change your mind
I'll take you higher, take you high

I can't take this any longer
I need, I need you like water
It's on the tip of my tongue
I'm not asking for much
Just your love and not another
'Cause your embrace keeps me warmer
Could I tell you this time
How I wish you were mine
How I wish you were mine
How I wish you were mine