Water Vapor Causing Climate Warming

karvind writes "According to BBC, new studies suggest that water vapor rather than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the main reason why Europe's climate is warming. The scientists say that rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gases are increasing humidity, which in turn amplifies the temperature rise. This is potentially a positive feedback mechanism which could increase the impact of greenhouse gases such as CO2. Even though 2005 will probably be warmest year, climatologists still differ in opinion"

Comments

Re:What if..

[pete314159]

Assuming this your post wasn't completely tongue-in-cheek...

So, in order to "mine" the water vapor out of the atmosphere, you would need some way of condensing the vapor. Any sort of heat exchanger would work, but the laws of thermodynamics dictate that, in the end, you would just be heating the atmosphere up more than accomplishing anything else. This does assume that the control volume for the system is the earth itself, and you're not using space as your 'cold reservoir'--doing that gets into all sort of pesky heat transfer issues as space is rather non conductive. There is something to be said for radiation, but it would only really be effective if shielded from the sun. Anyway, since the most likely mediums for heat rejection would probably be either the atmosphere (you lose), the ocean (you lose again), or the terrestrial bits of the earth (you lose still), all you would be doing it heating the atmosphere up more and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere in the long run.