My Dutch newspaper (electronically at nrc.nl) drew my attention to this
American-Swiss scientific report. The abstract/summary is freely
available at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1182488. Or
through the Digital Object Identifier site:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1182488

For the full text I can use my AAAS subscription. If anyone is truly
interested in the full report, I could email the pdf file, but I'm not
totally sure of the copyright rules.

Science does progress, but the elucidation of complicated
interrelationships of atmospheric regulations is not yet complete, it
appears. (A somewhat sarcastic statement perhaps, but I do believe that
we should quit pouring CO2 into the atmosphere).

Here is the summary:

Contributions of Stratospheric Water Vapor to Decadal Changes in the Rate
of Global Warming
Susan Solomon,1 Karen Rosenlof,1 Robert Portmann,1 John Daniel,1 Sean
Davis,1,2 Todd Sanford,1,2 Gian-Kasper Plattner3

Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the
year 2000. Here, we show that this acted to slow the rate of increase in
global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25% compared to
that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases. More limited data suggest that stratospheric water
vapor probably increased between 1980 and 2000, which would have enhanced
the decadal rate of surface warming during the 1990s by about 30%
compared to estimates neglecting this change. These findings show that
stratospheric water vapor represents an important driver of decadal
global surface climate change.

1 NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Chemical Sciences Division,
Boulder, CO, USA.
2 Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences,
University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA.
3 Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of
Bern, Sidlerstrasse 5, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.

Received for publication 25 September 2009. Accepted for publication 12
January 2010.








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Best regards
Han
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