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Ian W says:
HR says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:17 am
So any lags in global temperature associated with this?
Because where ever you think 2010 global temp is going to finish it’s going to take a stretch to describe it as cool no matter how many personnel reports of it being cold outside. Certainly the UAH satellite data doesn’t seem to have it cool.
‘Cool’ and ‘hot’ are measures of temperature.
Temperature does not equal heat content
A dry airmass (see http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/east/natl/flash-wv.html ) holds far less heat than a humid airmass. So all that dry air you can see near the tropics is really hot but holds far less heat than the humid airmass.
Everyone is using the incorrect metric.
After all the ‘green house gas’ theory is that ‘heat’ is trapped in the atmosphere. The amount of temperature rise in air depends on its enthalpy which is driven largely by its water vapor content.
So scientists should stop measuring temperature and doing temperature comparisons ! They are meaningless.
I’ve mentioned to people that the temperature at the south pole could go up 20 degrees, and if the moisture content went up as well, and we got a LOT of precipitation where there is little now, we could see a massive increase in the polar ice cap even though temperatures warmed, since the average would still be way below freezing.
Sure, over-simplistic, but it at least makes people think.