| Kynes said: Not in the sense most global warming/climate change discussions mention it. It's the same when media outlets use refrigeration towers expelling water vapour (another pollutant by your definition) to show the "pollution", because CO2 is transparent and they can't alarm people with it. |
Let me make this clear. I think the media have done a terrible job all around on the issue - failure to actually inform, spent most of the time going for the cheap alarmist approach rather than the rational "it makes sense" approach. I think that anyone that listens to what Al Gore has to say on the issue is failing the very first test of understanding of science - that it's scientists, not politicians, that you should be listening to.
It is my opinion that you should be listening to the experts, and not to the pseudoscience that is spouted by so-called "skeptics" (who are, rather, very much cynics - a skeptic keeps an open mind), any more than you should be listening to the media or to politicians.
And who am I to be saying this stuff? Well, I have my PhD in mathematical physics, with my field of expertise being fluid dynamics and its relation to heat transfer and phase change processes. While the specific application researched in my PhD wasn't climate change (it was a much smaller-scale context, to do with spray dryers), my understanding of both the mathematics and the physics of the systems in question makes it particularly easy for me to understand the science involved. And I, like just about every other person who has expertise in fields relating to climate change, agree that climate change is currently being driven by human activities, that while it has certainly been hotter in the past, the problem right now is not the absolute temperature, but the rate of change of temperature, which is nearly unprecedented. (EDIT: just to be clear - I'm not referring to the "hockey stick"... which wasn't even what the "skeptics" claim it to be anyway... but to long term trends)
And yes, water vapour can be a pollutant in some contexts. But that said, I would not describe a cloud of water vapour to inherently be a pollutant, just as I wouldn't describe CFCs to inherently be a pollutant - they are a problem only when they enter the upper atmosphere, in the vicinity of the ozone layer, where they react with the ozone molecules and essentially destroy them (using a lay term, there).
Here's something that you won't hear from politicians or the media - the feedback system caused by increased carbon dioxide in the air is in part due to the fact that it causes an increase in water vapour in the upper atmosphere, too. And water vapour is actually an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas. It all feeds back in on itself, and while there are negative feedbacks in the system as well, they operate on a longer timescale.
And even if all of that weren't true, the key point remains the same - that the biggest issue at hand is that we are filling the atmosphere with various pollutants, and wasting resources such as oil and gas, at a prodigious rate, and even if the climate were perfectly stable during this, it still can't be healthy for us or for the environment.
