Ep17 - SUMMARY of the ENTIRE SERIES!

A lot has been covered in the past 16 episodes, so many a climate hot take (excuse the pun) has been dealt with!

Surely it can't all be summarised in half an hour? Oh ye of little faith!

This will be the penultimate episode of the podcast, find us on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/@CounteringClimateSkepticism

TIMESTAMP AVAILABLE!

SHOWNOTES - COMING UP

@4.33 - Earth's atmosphere and oceans aren't as big as you might think!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dxa8a7CaVKQUtH6YwVZ2hhBo5HLnbdcbVoVwnLoyE6A/mobilebasic

@12.39 - XKCD - it's the rate stupid!
https://xkcd.com/1732/

@7.43: ”IT’S NOT CO2 IT’S WATER VAPOUR(H20)!”
Do you remember why the denier brings up water vapour (H20) John?
       -1x H20 molecule is 5-10x more potent a warming gas than a CO2 one
       -H20 is typically around 20x more abundant in the atmosphere, so with just this knowledge one might think, maybe the denier might have a point! Maybe CO2 isn’t our main problem?

Now in episode 3 I came up with a fairly convoluted explanation for how you can win in a fight with a skeptic brandishing this argument, however I have since seen a clearer explanation.

So in climate science, the understanding is that CO2 acts as a kind of thermostat. More CO2 in the atmosphere, higher global temperatures. But as the temperature rises, so does the amount of water vapour evaporated from the ocean. Okay they both seem to increase in tandem so why are we sure it’s increased CO2 causing increased H2O and not vice versa?

Well imagine you were a misguided super villain John and decided that you wanted to make global warming even worse! So you devise a machine to pump out extra H2O into the atmosphere, what would happen? Pretty quickly the extra bit you pumped in, would just rain out, because it is the temperature that sets the ceiling for how much H20/water vapour can be 'held' by the atmosphere before it falls out as rain.

Alternatively if you were a super hero and wanted to improve global warming, by sucking H2O out of the atmosphere, all that would happen is just that evaporation rates from the ocean would just increase to counter the change you are trying to make.

So essentially water vapour is buffered at a particular temperature dependant set-point in the atmosphere, so only by changing the temperature first can you change this set point.

CO2 on the other hand is not buffered. If we dump more in the atmosphere, the concentration does go and stays up. If we suck it out, concentrations do come down and stay down. Therefore H2O responds to CO2 not the other way round! 

If that makes sense!