It Ain't The Carbon Dioxide

I have been hearing more than a few of the AGW faithful blaming the heat waves we’ve been experiencing on CO2, totally ignoring anything else that might have contributed to the heat waves...like water. Or in this case, over 146 million metric tons of extra water injected into the atmosphere.

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. He led a new study examining the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams [146 million metric tons]) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer. That’s nearly four times the amount of water vapor that scientists estimate the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines lofted into the stratosphere.

That is a lot of water, or in this case, water vapor injected into Earth’s stratosphere. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but it also has an amplifying effect in regard to other greenhouse gases. With the amount of water added to the stratosphere due to the Tonga eruption it shouldn’t be surprising there may be warmer than normal temperatures. Eventually that extra water vapor will be gone and the amplification effect won’t be there.