Global warming-fact or fiction and how do you propose we tackle it?

[famousringo]

Sqrl said:

Not sure what I am missing but I'm honestly not seeing what you're driving at.

 

In any case the point I am driving at is that the human impact is pretty negligable.

 

 

But if we remove water vapor:

And a better look at these breakdowns:

So really the only thing Humans contribute to in a meaningful way is the category of "Other" which is only 0.007% of GHGs by concentration and 1.4% by effect, and that is after you remove water vapor. You could probably make a case that we contribute meaningfully to Methane also, but still that only accounts for .471% by concentration and 7.199% by effect.

To be fair this data is probably out of date by now, but I don't have a huge list of bookmarks to work from or anything so I just did a google search for global warming and water vapor and used the first data I found that looked credible and had a good credits section.

It appears to be from 2000 which is recent enough to be at the bare minimum a good indicator of how things are, even if not 100% accurate.

 

Edit: A quick weighting of everything shows that not including water vapor, humans are responsible for 5.5% of warming due to greenhouse effect. Considering that even the most diehard pro-GW scientist won't say that the GHE is responsible for all climate change I think 5.5% of a smaller portion is quickly getting into the territory of negligable.

But even then I still think there is reason to doubt that the current warming is related to the GHE in any meaningful way just based on the NASA satellite data.

I see you're using the same site that Linkzmax used. Did you notice the post where I expose that this person cites sources that don't agree with him? What I said earlier in this thread about this site:

 Your link's references don't check out on the 95% figure. In fact, it looks like he's deliberately misrepresenting the facts. Here's one of his citations for his 95% figure:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/environment/appd_d.html 

"Given the present composition of the atmosphere, the contribution to the total heating rate in the troposphere is around 5 percent from carbon dioxide and around 95 percent from water vapor. In the stratosphere, the contribution is about 80 percent from carbon dioxide and about 20 percent from water vapor. It is important to remember, however, that it is currently believed that the impact of water vapor produced from surface sources such as fuel combustion on the atmospheric water vapor concentrations is minimal."

This article also contains a table which suggests that CO2 is responsible for 12% of the total greenhouse effect.

 

Table D2. Efficiency of Heat Trapping by Greenhouse Gases and Clouds
Species Removed	Percentage Heat Trapped	Percentage Heat Not Trapped
Alla	0	100
H2O, CO2, O3	50	50
H2O	64	36
Clouds	86	14
CO2	88	12
O3	97	3
None	100	0
CO2 = Carbon dioxide. H2O = Water vapor. O3 = Ozone. aIncludes clouds. Source: V. Ramanathan and J.A. Coakley, Jr., “Climate Modeling Through Radiative-Convective Models,” Review of Geophysics & Space Physics 16 (1978):465.

The cited source clearly states that removing all CO2 from the atmosphere would reduce the GHE by 12%. Well, maybe it's not so clear if you're only looking for the one sentence that sounds like it supports your argument.