Sorry Dave it's true, water vapour is a greenhouse emission:

http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/gases.html

We're going to have to agree to disagree on this matter, I'm afraid. And even if I were to concede the point, you'll never convince me that we Humans put more water vapour into the air than oceanic evaporation does.

Just to qualify that Dave, you are correct in that 99.99% of water vapour in the atmosphere is natually produced.

Of course if we all started driving vehilces that produced water vapour tomorrow  that might have somewhat more of an impact!!

Just to state I am somewhat of a sceptic on the whole man made global warming theories as lets be honest the planet goes through cycles of warming and cooling all by itself without an intervention from us and has been WAY hotter than it is now n the past.

and I probably should have said gas rather than emission 

Hey, you're both right. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas but it also cools the planet due to being white and reflecting sunlight back into space. Have you never noticed a clear day get warmer when the clouds blow in?
The problem with water vapour is where you create it. Aircraft are the worst for this due to putting it into the 30k to 45k feet region; where it cools the planet but disrupts natural cycles. Most noticably recorded when all USA's planes were grounded on 9/11.

Volcanoes are bad polluters but they still don't release tons of CFCs. What pollution is key here. And it's very complicated not least due to human politics.

One of the worst greenhouse gases is methane and if the permafrost in Russia disappear, we're in for a whole lot of extra warming problems. Humans ARE making a big difference to global warming. Anyone who says otherwise is a global warming denier.

Oh, I'm not saying we don't contribute to this planet's atmospheric woes; of course we do. I'm just not convinced that our level of complicity is as high as some folks purport. The most compelling evidence that I can offer is the correlation between global mean temperatures and sunspot/CME activity, mentioned here. Now granted, not everyone in the scientific community supports this theory/hypothesis, but then again, the same can be said for Mankind's contribution to climate change.

Oh! I forgot to mention... Volcanoes, to use the quaint Yank saying, "don't have a dog in the CFC race", since Cloro-FLouro-Carbons are pretty much all man-made, and don't generally exist in nature. So that part is all us. Better?

Recently I became quite convinced that man was contributing to global warming after seening a program on TV, they went up in a ballon and measured the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, there is no doubt it is increasing and has been since mans use of fossil fuels.

As for water being a green house gas ... I thought when there was too much water up there that it just comes back down as rain. 


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As the Earth warms, more water evaporates, more clouds. Also jet aircraft are still on the increase.

As for CO2, the problem is still getting worse.

Or maybe this one?

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Dave, although I find global warming quite a serious issue, your posted graph has helped me see it in a new light.

Hehe, good one. 

Oh, I take Mankind's sullying of our beautiful home very seriously, too. The problem I have is that most of the so-called "experts" are just plain too quick to lay blame for phenomena that they don't fully understand. I've never seen the skyline of London on an average day with my own eyes, but I've lived in several places in Southern California, and I've seen, first hand, the effects of our automobiles and factories on our atmosphere, and I've also seen the terrible toll that littering has taken on the wildlife (or what's left of it) that we should be harmlessly co-existing with (but aren't). Humanity is to blame for a lot of the ills that our planet is suffering from these days. But not everything that the environmentalist community is so gung-ho to lay at our feet is wholly our doing.

I have my own, rather depressing, views on this matter too. I am keeping them to myself at the mo.

Thanks Dave, for the wonderfully funny graph.

To para phrase Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd fame), we will probably amuse ourselves to death.