Sweden plans to be world's first oil-free economy

[gregorach]

Bellamy is indeed respected in his field of expertise, but energy policy ain't it. He is, unfortunately, something of a crackpot in this arena. Whether you like Monbiot or not, the inarguable facts were entirely on his side in that particular debate - Bellamy was quoting specific research claims that had no basis in fact. The research simply did not say what he claimed that it did. But this has been discussed here before, and it's not worth going over again.

As for brown-outs due to wind variability, according to the largest wind resource survey to date (carried out by researchers from Oxford University) there is very little risk of that, provided generating sites are properly distributed. The UK is a remarkably windy country, thanks to our location.

Conversely, nuclear power plants have a nasty habit of having to be taken off-line for substatial periods of time, either due to accidents or for maintenance (the total lifetime load factor for the UK reactor fleet is approximately 70%). Since any given nuclear installation represents a much larger proportion of total generating capacity than any given windfarm, the potential for outages is almost certainly greater for nuclear than for wind.

Of course, nobody with any sense is proposing 100% reliance on wind...

However, the really big problem isn't electricity generation, it's transport fuel. Biofuels simply cannot produce the amount of fuel we currently use, not without a spare planet or two devoted to producing fuel and nothing else. As far as I can see, there is no currently feasible means of maintaining our current levels of transport fuel use in a sustainable manner. No matter what else happens, we're going to have to severely curtail our use of transport. The only choice is whether we accept that and try to deal with it smoothly, or remain in denial until it's too late to manage an orderly transistion.

 

[Lifthasir]

I gave up believing anything Monbiot says a long time ago. He has more
hidden agendas than Rex Deus and less balance than a toe-less tightrope
walker in a high cross wind...I didn't see the debate with Bellamy, but I've listened
to Bellamy on other occasions - he was right about one thing on which he was
accused of being a crackpot...large wind turbines are killing birds...lots of birds.

 

[Lurch]

We're already on the brink of brown outs without any reliance on wind power. I live in a fairly windy place but the turbines I see from my window are inactive a surprisingly large amount of the time - more likely to be when it's cold.

I don't object to wind turbines on a visual level, but I do believe that in terms of contribution to our energy policy at best they are a white elephant and at worst they are a distraction from finding a real solution.

 

[Lifthasir]

Lurch - I think you're right there. Wind is a good solution for remote crofts perhaps and the domestic version promised by Renewable Devices looks promising, but I think it's an easy solution for the government to produce a
quick fix and be seen to be doing something.

I think we need to concentrate on reducing power demand. If we do, small
scale wind/solar etc..becomes more meaningful. But with washers, dryers,
cookers and kettles devouring energy what can we do.

Having such appliances is roughly the equivalent of each home having one
or two domestic employees.

I heard of some gyms (probably in America) that are hooking up their
exercise machines to generate electricity.

Will we see the day when each member of the household has to do 45mins
on the 'exercise' bike to keep the family battery topped up. Would help with
the obesity crisis, wouldn't it?

 

[gregorach]

As far as I am aware, there is no actual evidence for the claim that wind turbines kill birds in any significant number. Cars certainly do, as do domestic cats. According to the RSPB: "The available evidence suggests that appropriately positioned wind farms do not pose a significant hazard for birds." If you can provide some evidence for that claim, I'd be very interested to hear it.

As for Monbiot / Bellamy, I'm not really interested in ad-hominem attacks. The simple fact is that Bellamy made a specific claim which was categorically and inarguably wrong. The research simply did not say what he said it did. For clarity, he claimed "555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980." This claim was subsequently described by the World Glacier Monitoring Service as "complete bull****". Anybody who bases their arguments on completely made-up data is a crackpot in my book.

 

[Lifthasir]

How do you explain all the dead birds around our local wind turbines? Loads of
dead Geese a while back...sparrows and blackbirds every day?

 

[Lifthasir]

http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=139872006

http://www.rspb.org.uk/action/eagledeaths.asp

http://www.globalwarming.org/article.php?uid=430

Proof that wind turbines kill birds...even the RSPB say so...

Dr Mark Avery, Conservation Director at the RSPB said: 'These findings are shocking yet may only be the tip of the iceberg.

 

[Lifthasir]

Writing in the new scientists David Bellamy wrote: "It should be pointed out that glaciers in many parts of the world are not shrinking but are in fact growing. In fact if you take all the evidence mentioned by the Kyotoists into consideration 55 of all the 625 glaciers under observation have been growing since 1980."

However the environmental campaigner George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian: "I telephoned the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read out Bellamy's letter. They said:'This is complete bxxxxit', the latest studies show that most of the world's glaciers are retreating."

Bellamy appears to have disputed the 'spin' put on the information. Even the
World Glacier Monitoring Service agree with Bellamy and say MOST and not ALL.

 

[tomtom]

Thanks for your input everyone, im really interested in all'a this and wanted to know specificly if it was even feasable with today technology to support our larger population, some very interesting reading!

 

[Keith_Beef]

I've mentioned before that the really big problem is a combination of our energy use per head in the industrialised and "post-industrial" world and to an even greater extent the increasing energy consumption in China, India and maybe one day in Africa.

China's economy is booming. There's no denying that.

India's is doing well.

Africa is still lagging way, way behind, but I hope that it's political problems will get sorted out (but I'm not going to get dragged into an argument about post-colonial Africa).

China extracts and consumes a huge amount of coal; coal use is even more damaging to the environment than oil use.

If the population of China even starts to approach European (yet alone American) levels of energy consumption, then the world is in for a big increase in global warming, even if the rest of the world does something as radical as Sweden.

I mentioned these points a while ago, and since then read two books by Jared Diamond that confirm this ("Guns, Germs and Steel" and especially "Collaspe").

As Gregorach points out, transport is a big problem as far as energy consumption is concerned. Fossil fuels are simply the most concentrated source of easily transportable energy that we know of. Unless engineers can find some way of storing energy that is as safe as diesel and petrol, with the same concentration of energy, we will not see an alternative to diesel powered ships and lorries, and petrol powered cars for a long time.

Railways can be more easily electrified, and that shifts the burden of solving the problems of greenhouse emissions and of fuel to the generation of electricity: there we have all the arguments about nuclear, biomass, solar and wind generation.

K.

 

[torjusg]

How do you explain all the dead birds around our local wind turbines? Loads of
dead Geese a while back...sparrows and blackbirds every day?

The wind parks in Norway kills lots of eagles.

Torjus Gaaren

 

[bushtuckerman]

Sorry I entered a bit of a rant…but anyway here’s another…

Andyn, your point about oil being used eventually despite a country’s best intentions is a good one, but the point you end with is better I think. Leading by example is an age old mindset which is tried and tested. I remember when David Attenborough (sp?) was asked why he didn’t put so much emphasis on caring for the environment in his wildlife programs, he replied, (very roughly – this is from poor memory) “I would rather I made people aware of how wonderful and exciting it [the world] is, than talk down to them and make them feel belittled by my commentary”, well something along those lines anyway. I think this holds true for many things. It is important to allow people to care before you force ideas down their throats, i.e. work from the ground up, if people have something to care about they will be more inclined to protect it. Of course, time is running out, and maybe instead it requires tough legislation.

Our government’s stance on nuclear power is somewhat comic. On the one hand the PM is desperate to meet Kyoto targets and has completely U-turned in announcing prospective plans to build new power stations to satisfy energy demands, and on the other hand our foreign policy (namely in Pakistan) is to oppose the splitting of the atom in countries we do not trust. Now, whatever his fears are of how these facilities might be used, he is still being utterly hypocritical. If we, all who inhabit the earth, are to halt CO2 production then we have to work, to some degree at least, in unison, and if he thinks that even zero emissions from this country will make a difference, then he should take a look at china. It is a bit of a moot point as I do not believe nuclear power is a realistic solution to the problem, but I think it shows how our PM thinks.

Oil exports to the west are predicted to peak in around five years time. Not only fertiliser production will suffer when we hit the dregs, it is also worth considering how much plastic we use. As I have said elsewhere, plastics are not indefinitely recyclable. Porcupine you highlight what it is that Sweden is preparing for, we all need to prepare for change in the same way, and that is through technology. They are altering their way of living to adapt to a changing climate, one without oil and with more greenhouse gases, they are displaying versatility in doing so; if we are to survive we must do the same, it is simply a question of when this transition happens, and whether it is driven by foresight or by panic (too late to preserve civilisation as it currently exists?)

Torjusg, Bangladesh I believe will also inevitably be one of the first nations to be on the receiving end of rising sea level, the water is already expanding and will not stop expanding even if we were to completely nullify CO2 emissions now.

Lifthasir, you are right, most energy is derived from fossil fuels, and energy and power are indeed directly linked, but that doesn’t mean they are one and the same. You seem to be better in touch than I am about the physics of this, so I won’t begin reeling off definitions, but let me make my point slightly differently.

We can derive 'power' from all kinds of energy sources. I can't see how you can
say that some of the energy forms that go into building wind turbines are not useful in the way that electricity is. Electricty is nothing more than a useful
by-product of 'burning' energy (fuel).

I think we could agree that the country is built around the use of electrical power; we have a national grid to supply it to the whole country. What I said was that the forms of energy which go into the production of wind farms (fossil etc) are not useful in the same way as fossil fuels are, say in transport. That is as far as that point went; I did not say that these are not useful forms of energy. We use electrical kettles more than we use stoves to heat them, so we ‘need’ electrical power to live the way we do, and how you get it is besides the point in this context.

I think that one of the problems in efficiency lies here, home-owners and industry use high powered devices, and that means that we have to make energy useful in this way, having high power is like having a high energy concentration at your disposal, and this is what the national grid provides. This means that we transmit electricity 100s of miles; the energy is centralised, and the resistance in the wires that do this for us wastes energy. One of the ways in which we can become more efficient is to localise energy, and I think (maybe I’ll be corrected here) this would mean putting up with lower powers at our disposal, in some areas, for example if a town provided all of the electrical energy it needed then there would be fewer sources of input and therefore a lower concentration of energy in that area. I believe the Green Party claim that we could reduce the country’s energy consumption by 40% by increasing efficiency alone.


Wind farms are not carbon neutral, neither is bio fuel (look up Malaysia and bio fuel, it’s a bit of a disaster as they are cutting down their forests to ease our conscience), and nor is nuclear power. And to answer your question silvergirl, no, nuclear power is not a renewable energy source; sadly politicians are easily misinformed, and it may have been the chief advisor to the government (on energy? Science? I’m not entirely sure) who it was that said this is the case. Politicians like to narrow their view to a single country when considering science, and perhaps this is the fault of scientists for not being clearer, but the science is complicated so it is more than likely to get ‘dumbed down’ a bit. What I mean by that is that you can say nuclear power stations are neutral if you ignore the fact that they have to be built, decommissioned, have their waste disposed of and require the mining and enriching of uranium (this all produces roughly, and if I remember correctly, 5 times the amount of CO2 relative to wind farms (it’s greater anyway), if seen joule for joule). Anyway, what the government get out of assuming this is staying on track to meet Kyoto targets (if the carbon is emitted in another country why should they care?); so of course, they happily accept this minor falsity. We all share the same atmosphere.

When choosing between sources of energy we, largely, are aiming to choose the lesser of many evils. Energy costs, no doubt about it. Ultimately this is why rising population can be seen at the root of the problem.

Gregorach, research into wind farms is likely to make them more and more attractive, it’s like anything you invest in, up until now we have invested in coal, oil and nuclear, and they provided, but are no longer acceptable. As I said, there are far more suitable areas for them than was previously thought. And of course, 100% reliance on any form of energy generation would be foolish, we have to be versatile and explore more than one way of cracking the nut. It is a long term investment so difficult to legislate for short term governments. The Green Party are the ones who would be tough enough, early enough I think, unless the public take this into their own hands.

Wind turbines may be killing birds, but don’t nuclear plants damage marine eco-systems? I have to admit I know little here.

 

[Lifthasir]

Someone refuted that turbines killed birds as the rantings of a looney (Bellamy).
This, hopefully, has been put straight - they do kill birds.
We have to accept truth before the relative merits can be discussed. They may
not kill as many birds as other things - they may kill more birds of prey etc. etc.

The energy crisis solution is simple. Allow (or kill) a few billion people in
the world. Anything else is just tinkering. However, it's not going to happen.

Mankind is never going to relinquish technology. Taking this point to its natural
conclusion, no one is going to give up fire-bows and hand drills. Well, these
items are technology, as are animal skin clothes, flint, stone and bone tools. All these things came about by technological advancement. Once attained, they gave those that had them a competitive edge.

Before WW1, we had a fragmented electrical grid system. There were over 600
independent power stations each of which served a local town. However, the war
proved that the system was in need of restructuring. It took until the early 1930's to achieve this. Labour nationalised the whole lot in 1948. This act of
centralization gave us standards i.e. voltages, frequency etc. The National Grid
also provides diversity so that power can be re-routed to avoid black outs. This is
something they are talking about doing with water supplies - to alleviate drought
in the South.

In Russia, they have centralized heating. All apartment blocks are fed from a central source. It is switched on in the Autumn and off in the Spring. Assuming
that maintenance and upkeep and performed correctly, this kind of system allows the state to control energy. It allows for efficiencies of scale. I believe
Iceland adopts a similar approach when they tap into the earth's crust for a
heat source pump affair.

Personally, I think the way forward is to be realistic. We should have a centralized 'National Grid' type of system but which only supplies a portion of
energy requirments. The remainder should be generated locally, either by small-scale domestic wind turbines (approx. 1kWh), solar etc.

I own some land and looked into short rotation coppicing i.e. willow. This sounds great until you get to the small print. In order to realise yields, you have to throw
loads of chemicals onto the ground so prevent weeds, parasites and disease. So much for a 'green' alternative. I can however still coppice, but the yields per acre will be much reduced such that it would serve the needs of me and my close family, perhaps a small profit - but it would encourage wild life.

One thing I can vouch for. My house was built in the 1940's. It never ceases to
amaze me how warm and draught free an 'average' new build is these days.

I feel that Wind Turbines are a quick fix - be seen to be doing something.

Now this may be controversial. New builds should be halted. Only maisonette type housing should be considered. It should be designed with very high heat and acoustic insulation and each 'block' should have solar, small-scale wind etc. built into the design. Dwellers should be alloted 'units' of energy which, when consumed, leaves them without. This will teach them to 'switch off' at night.

It doesn't make sense to knock down a house like mine, as the energy involved in manufacturing new materials and tranporting them and putting them together would result in a huge 'net' loss in energy and environmental terms. People like me will probably be forced to knit more woollies in the winter - and that should be down to choice whether I continue to live here or move on.

The oil will run out, the price will rise and rise. People will move closer to their jobs, buy energy saving items etc..When oil prices reach high enough, alternatives suddenly become viable. Five grand to power your home each year or five grand to install solar which results in saving 2 grand a year - it suddenly
becomes viable. Or spend an extra grand heating the house to 20C or wear a
woolly jumper?

Perhaps we should have planned blackouts. Maybe we've had it too good the past 25 years. Maybe we should be forced into saving energy. If the grid switched off for 30mins each night - imagine the savings (ignoring re-start inefficiencies etc).

Just remember - all the tehcnical fleece garments - all man made - all oil!!!

Wear wool. Having a scratch enables you to reach parts you wouldn't ordinarily
reach for. Who knows, you might discover something about yourself!!!

 

[gregorach]

Someone refuted that turbines killed birds as the rantings of a looney (Bellamy).

Not quite - the point about birds and turbines was entirely seperate from the point about Bellamy. You've given me a lot to think about on the birds and turbines issue, for which I thank you.

I think you're probably right that it's going to end up needing something like a program of rolling blackouts to square the amount of energy we can sustainably produce with the amount we use, and I also totally agree with your ideas about local micro-generation. Ultimately I think we're going to have to compeltely re-engineer our society. Of course, the problem is that such ideas are currently politically unaccaptable...

Have you encoutered an idea called Permaculture? I think you might find it interesting...

 

[torjusg]

Have you encoutered an idea called Permaculture? I think you might find it interesting...

Interesting idea, but unfeasable I believe. It seems like an utopy. Greed will always make people increase their land usage. How will the project be started and enforced? Seems like it could become a Burma2. I know for sure that I don't want to be a peasant to a feudal lord.

With the current population I don't think this project is possible to follow through. A dieoff will be needed in advance.

And agriculture is too effective, we would be back the path of destroying nature in no time.

To me this sounds like a mix between hippie-lifestyle and communism. And neither of those became a widespread success.

Torjus Gaaren

 

[gregorach]

Well, it's already been started - there are thousands of permaculturists doing projects all over the world. It's not intended to be mandated and imposed from above - that simply wouldn't work, as you correctly point out. Rather it's about comunities developing their own local solutions to their own local problems. The hope is that the idea will spread naturally if individual projects succeed.

 

[Lifthasir]

Permaculture would work for small population densities, but not for anthing like
the population densities we have in the UK.

Developed countries have enough food for about 3 days. Hunger is just one missed meal away.

Here's a poser for everyone's thinking cap...

If the food chain completely broke down, how would we feed ourselves? There
aren't enough of even dandelions to make a start. If oil and gas supplies ran dry tomorrow, how long do you think the trees and shrubs would last in the UK? Even more pressing, what if the water network failed?

I wonder how fertile our arable fields are after decades of chemical abuse?
It could take a couple of years or more growing clover on them to restore sufficient nitrogen for growing crops...

Re. Bellamy - as a scientist and Professor, he is at least as qualified and perhaps more so regarding energy policy than Monbiot, who appears to consider himself 'qualified' to gas on about hundreds of unrelated subjects.

 

[Lifthasir]

I've found the 'controversial letter that Bellamy wrote. People can now judge for
themselves how much of a 'crackpot' he is. Note his reference that there are
18,000 other 'crackpot' scientists who are refuting some of the global warming
science....

by Professor David Bellamy
Daily Mail, July 9, 2004
Whatever the experts say about the howling gales, thunder and lightning we've had over the past two days, of one thing we can be certain. Someone, somewhere - and there is every chance it will be a politician or an environmentalist - will blame the weather on global warming.

But they will be 100 per cent wrong. Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy makers are not.

Instead, they have an unshakeable in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement. Humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide - the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up.

They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock. Unfortunately, for the time being, it is their view that prevails.

As a result of their ignorance, the world's economy may be about to divert billions, nay trillions of pounds, dollars and roubles into solving a problem that actually doesn't exist. The waste of economic resources is incalculable and tragic.

Dreaded
To explain why I believe that global warming is largely a natural phenomenon that has been with us for 13,000 years and probably isn't causing us any harm anyway, we need to take heed of some basic facts of botanical science.

For a start, carbon dioxide is not the dreaded killer greenhouse gas that the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the subsequent Kyoto Protocol five years later cracked it up to be. It is, in fact, the most important airborne fertiliser in the world, and without it there would be no green plants at all.

That is because, as any schoolchild will tell you, plants take in carbon dioxide and water and, with the help of a little sunshine, convert them into complex carbon compounds - that we either eat, build with or just admire - and oxygen, which just happens to keep the rest of the planet alive.

Increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, double it even, and this would produce a rise in plant productivity. Call me a biased old plant lover but that doesn't sound like much of a killer gas to me. Hooray for global warming is what I say, and so do a lot of my fellow scientists.

Let me quote from a petition produced by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which has been signed by over 18,000 scientists who are totally opposed to the Kyoto Protocol, which committed the world's leading industrial nations to cut their production of greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels.

They say: 'Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide are in error and do not conform to experimental knowledge.'

You couldn't get much plainer than that. And yet we still have public figures such as Sir David King, scientific adviser to Her Majesty's Government, making preposterous statements such as 'by the end of this century, the only continent we will be able to live on is Antarctica.'

At the same time, he's joined the bandwagon that blames just about everything on global warming, regardless of the scientific evidence. For example, take the alarm about rising sea levels around the south coast of England and subsequent flooding along the region's rivers. According to Sir David, global warming is largely to blame.

But it isn't at all - it's down to bad management of water catchments, building on flood plains and the incontestable fact that the south of England is gradually sinking below the waves.

And that sinking is nothing to do with rising sea levels caused by ice-caps melting. Instead, it is purely related to an entirely natural warping of the Earth's crust, which could only be reversed by sticking one of the enormously heavy ice-caps from past ice ages back on top of Scotland.

Ah, ice ages... those absolutely massive changes in global climate that environmentalists don't like to talk about because they provide such strong evidence that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon.

It was round about the end of the last ice age, some 13,000 years ago, that a global warming process did undoubtedly begin.

Not because of all those Stone age folk roasting mammoth meat on fossil fuel camp fires but because of something called the 'Milankovitch Cycles,' an entirely natural fact of planetary life that depends on the tilt of the Earth's axis and its orbit around the sun.

Melted
The glaciers melted, the ice cap retreated and Stone Age man could begin hunting again. But a couple of millennia later, it got very cold again and everyone headed south. Then it warmed up so much that water from melted ice filled the English Channel and we became an island.

The truth is that the climate has been yo-yo-ing up and down ever since. Whereas it was warm enough for Romans to produce good wine in York, on the other hand, King Canute had to dig up peat to warm his people. And then it started getting warm again.

Up and down, up and down - that is how temperature and climate have always gone in the past and there is no proof they are not still doing exactly the same thing now. In other words, climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon, nothing to do with the burning of fossil fuels.

In fact, a recent scientific paper, rather unenticingly titled 'Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations Over The Last Glacial Termination,' proved it.

It showed that increases in temperature are responsible for increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, not the other way around.

Ignored
But this sort of evidence is ignored, either by those who believe the Kyoto Protocol is environmental gospel or by those who know 25 years of hard work went into securing the agreement and simply can't admit that the science it is based on is wrong.

The real truth is that the main greenhouse gas - the one that has the most direct effect on land temperature - is water vapour, 99 per cent of which is entirely natural.

If all the water vapour was removed from the atmosphere, the temperature would fall by 33 degrees Celsius. But, remove all the carbon dioxide and the temperature might fall by just 0.3 per cent.

Although we wouldn't be around, because without it there would be no green plants, no herbivorous farm animals and no food for us to eat.

It has been estimated that the cost of cutting fossil fuel emissions in line with the Kyoto Protocol would be £76trillion. Little wonder, then, that world leaders are worried. So should we all be.

If we signed up to these scaremongers, we could be about to waste a gargantuan amount of money on a problem that doesn't exist - money that could be used in umpteen better ways: fighting world hunger, providing clean water, developing alternative energy sources, improving our environment, creating jobs.

The link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth. It is time the world's leaders, their scientific advisers and many environmental pressure groups woke up to the fact.

 

[gregorach]

Bellamy's understanding of amtospheric physics and climateology are flawed and simplistic, as is his reasoning. The existence of the Milankovitch Cycle and the history of natural climate variablity do not preclude anthropogenic warming. Nobody is arguing that the climate is not naturally variable. If you're in a small boat on a rough sea, the fact that the boat is pitching anyway does not mean that jumping up and down on the gunwhales can't capsize you.

Such matters are dealt with very well on RealClimate. I'll take the climateologists over a botanist in this one thanks.

However, this is getting increasingly off-topic for this thread...

 

[gregorach]

Oh, and he's doing that making-up-data thing again when he talks about the proportion of greenhouse effect that's due to water vapour:

The overlaps complicate things, but it's clear that water vapour is the single most important absorber (between 36% and 66% of the greenhouse effect), and together with clouds makes up between 66% and 85%. CO2 alone makes up between 9 and 26%, while the O3 and the other minor GHG absorbers consist of up to 7 and 8% of the effect, respectively. The remainders and uncertainties are associated with the overlaps which could be attributed in various ways that I'm not going to bother with here. Making some allowance (+/-5%) for the crudeness of my calculation, the maximum supportable number for the importance of water vapour alone is about 60-70% and for water plus clouds 80-90% of the present day greenhouse effect. (Of course, using the same approach, the maximum supportable number for CO2 is 20-30%, and since that adds up to more than 100%, there is a slight problem with such estimates!).

Source: Water vapour, feedback or forcing? (RealClimate.org)