Seeing the environmental forest

It appears that the relative humidity and specific humidity continues to trip some people up.  Yes, I'm thinking of the screed James Taylor wrote on Forbes.com on Aug. 20 .  In his article, Taylor trumpets two "facts".  First, that relative humidity has declined and second, that specific humidity isn't rising as fast as global climate models predict.  Since climate models assume that relative humidity has stayed constant, Taylor then claims that models are overestimating global warming.  Unfortunately for Taylor, his "facts" don't check out.

After Joseph Fourier deduced the existence of the greenhouse effect in the 1820s, it took until 1861 before John Tyndall identified the first components of the greenhouse effect as water vapor and CO 2 ( Tyndall 1861 ).  One hundred fifty-two years of research later, we know far more about the absorptive properties of  CO 2  and other greenhouse gases , including water vapor, including how they affect Earth's infrared spectrum.