Temperature and Humidity - The Affects on Global Warming

A new study has revealed that measuring global warming should not only include heat as a guide but that humidity is also a contributing factor. 

Measuring the temperature of heat generated by climate change and also including humidity levels can provide a more comprehensive study of climate change as indicated in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences   Co-author V. Ramanathan a professor and climatologist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego and Cornell University has said “There are two drivers of climate change: temperature and humidity” “and so far we measured global warming just in terms of temperature”. By adding energy from humidity “the extremes, heat waves, rainfall and other measures of extremes” “correlate much better”.

There were three major findings in the PNAS study “Trends in surface equivalent potential temperature: A more comprehensive metric for global warming and weather extremes

• The humidity increase with temperature is just as important, if not more so, in determining the magnitude of global warming.
• The latent heat released in the atmosphere also increases with the warming because of the exponential increase of saturation vapour pressure with temperature
• The humidity increase with global warming and the associated increase in latent energy of the atmosphere play a major role in determining weather extremes. They have also led to more frequent and stronger extreme events such as heat waves, hurricanes, convection storms, and flash floods”

Veerabhadran Ramanathan is a leading researcher on global warming. In 1975 he discovered the super greenhouse effect caused by CFCs and showed that if we reduced emissions of short lived pollutants e.g. methane, this would lead to a dramatic slowing down of warming and would also reduce air pollution.

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