EM Smith has been looking at water vapour in the air at http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/its-the-water-and-a-lot-more-vapor/ … after sitting in his garden drinking some beer and feeling the heat of the Californian sun burning his skin. Heat is dry in California but when he was working in Florida last year, it was also hot, but humid – and he didn't burn. He got to wondering and being an IT buff went to his computer to find out if anyone else had noticed this – and bingo, there were several papers published over the last 5 to 10 years which also noted water vapour may play a role in temperature at the surface of the Earth. The water vapour is of course the difference between California and Florida – the humidity factor.
Water vapour can cool the climate – and this has already been advanced as one of the reasons for the current pause in global warming (see also www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-water-vapor-in-the-stratosphere-sl…). However, the same paper says the interface between the stratosphere and the troposphere has cooled – so is that what has caused the water vapour to change (which Chiefio interpets as less energy hitting the atmosphere from the direction of the Sun). As tropospheric water vapour rises it cools the surface – which is the exact opposite of what climate scientists seem to claim (assuming water vapour is a greenhouse gas). As such, water vapour completely dwarfs the amount of co2 in the atmosphere – so to say it is not a greenhouse gas would get up some peoples nose (very quickly). Water vapour, it would seem, blocks IR and UV light (which is why his skin did not burn in Florida but does so in California). Water matters – co2 does not matter. It is such a small part of the atmosphere. We live on a water planet.