The world isn't just getting hotter from man-made global warming, 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 man-made global warming, according to a study published in Thursday's journal Nature.
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Humidity increased over most of the globe, including the eastern United States, said study co-author Katharine Willett, a climate researcher at Yale University. However, a few regions, including the U.S. West, South Africa and parts of Australia were drier.
The finding isn't surprising to climate scientists. Physics dictates that warmer air can hold more moisture. But Gillett's study shows that the increase in humidity already is significant and can be attributed to gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
To show that this is man-made, Gillett ran computer models to simulate past climate conditions and studied what would happen to humidity if there were no man-made greenhouse gases. It didn't match reality.
He looked at what would happen from just man-made 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.
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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 projections for temperature increases, that would mean a 12 to 24 percent increase in humidity by the year 2100.
Sticky and hot. Wow. We are REALLY headed back to the Eocene. Increased humidity ought to make it interesting for storm and wind conditions. The fact that the Western US is getting drier is...interesting. It must be a combination of the wind circulation patterns and the lack of large sources of inland water other than snowpack.
Interesting. Very interesting. And disturbing.
2 comments:
Yeah, but we weren't seeing that in your old stomping ground in Las Cruces and the El Paso area the last two years. It has (felt like) rained more here than in past years. I put the '(felt like)' in there because I didn't acutally look at the yearly totals. But remember the floods in Alamogordo, Hatch, and El Paso last year?
I remember the floods. Nasty business that. The thing is that you guys are coming out of a decade long drought. It's supposed to be the once per century kinda thing and lasts approximately a decade. Hence the more water in a long time kinda thing.
However, the climate shifts that are supposed to be coming are going to shuffling around the weather patterns. What precipitation you will get will come more catastrophically and there is supposed to be far, far less precip as a while though for NM. It's jsut wehn it comes, it will come as a big BOOM.
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