The water vapour penny precipitates, almost, for Willis Eschenbach at WUWT

There's a new article at WUWT by Willis Eschenbach (archived here, latest here). It took him almost twenty years, but he's finally found the RSS total precipitable water (TPW) record. For years Willis has been arguing that Earth's climate can't change much because of thunderstorms. It seems that he may have finally woken up to the fact that there is more water vapour in a warmer atmosphere than in a cooler one and that this is contributing to the greenhouse effect. He wrote (about the dataset that was reported 20 years ago in 1996): "One of my great pleasures is to come across a new dataset."

I've been meaning to write about global warming, water vapour and precipitation for some time. There have been several papers on the subject (see below). What's happening is:

• the amount of water in the air is increasing as the world warms,
• the water cycle is intensifying,
• therefore there is more rain (and snow), and
• more greenhouse warming because water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas.

Warning: This is a rather long article, with no apologies :)

Falsifying projections from WUWT

It is becoming less fashionable to deny climate science these days. As the Paris meeting approaches, more deniers are shifting a tad away from the extreme end of denial. Even James Inhofe, one of the extremist fake sceptics in the USA, favourably quoted Dr James Hansen in a recent op-ed piece promoting nuclear power as a way to reduce emissions.

Anthony Watts at WUWT if anything has shifted toward, not away from, extremist denial. Every now and again he'll publish an article in which a person claims to accept global warming - to a point. That point being that they don't accept that it has or will warm as much as has and will.

Today he's allowed an article from one such science denier, Richard J. Petschauer (archived here). I think he's trying to portray himself as a "reasonable person", though his ideas aren't reasonable at all.

No, water vapour is not what's *causing* global warming

Tim Ball wrote at WUWT an article with a misleading headline (as is usual at WUWT)):

Thanks To The IPCC, the Public Doesn’t Know Water Vapor Is Most Important Greenhouse Gas

This is a "back to basics" article. The basics being: CO2 is a greenhouse gas. As atmospheric CO2 increases, the earth gets hotter. As temperatures rise, more water evaporates.  Water is also a greenhouse gas. More atmospheric water vapour means the world gets hotter still.

The lack of basic scientific knowledge displayed at WUWT sometimes surprises even me.