Are water cycles the missing piece of the climate crisis puzzle?
When we talk about the greenhouse effect, we rarely talk about the fact that most of it is not caused by carbon dioxide (although most of global warming probably is). Yet, as a greenhouse gas, water vapour contributes 70% of the insulation that keeps solar energy within our atmosphere, at the right temperature for life. CO2’s impact is at around just 20% of that, though it is rising. One of the reasons for this skewed perception revolves around us not struggling to measure how much water vapour is around at any one time because it varies according to where you are. Meanwhile, we can measure CO...