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Rob Lewis's avatar

Great work, Alpha!

Do you think it correct to think of evapotranspiration as "escorting" heat past the CO2? The water vapor, by holding what would otherwise be long wave radiation and carrying it up out of the CO2 rich zone to the CO2 thin zone seems to be a critical part of the process. Do models recognize this at all? It doesn't sound like it.

The other thing that puzzles me, is how physicists hold this assumption that latent heat returns 100% to the Earth. If it's released where space is closer, the air is colder, and greenhouse gasses are thinner, then common sense says some heat will escape before following atmospheric currents back into the system. How can something so obvious get missed, or am I missing something.

Have you ever thought about writing an editorial about this for a scientific magazine?

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Didi Pershouse's avatar

Thanks so much for putting all of this together so cogently. One thing to add here is that in a diversely vegetated landscape (that is giving off lots of condensation nuclei like plant VOCs) the water vapor from evapotranspiration will recondense and reevaporate many times before it becomes a cloud up in the sky. We see it in the morning mists, and the oddly changing low clouds that then disappear and reappear in other forms. This means that the heat is also shifting from latent to sensible to latent again, but presumably still rising. Yet another complexity that is truly impossible to model because each water molecule is doing its own dance.

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