#161: The Earth Sauna— First Thread of a Hidden Weave
How Arctic vapor emissions are reshaping Northern Hemisphere climate — from fog belts to jetstreams to melt zones. A journey into the feedbacks the models forgot.
Let’s begin not with satellite data, but with your skin.
You sit in a sauna. The air is dry.
Warm, yes — but not yet immersive.
Then someone pours a ladle of water on the stones.
Ssssshhh.
A hiss. Then a swirl.
The heat doesn’t increase. It changes.
It stops being something you feel on your skin —
and becomes something you feel within.
What just happened?
The water, evaporating, carried with it a hidden payload — energy.
2.45 million joules per kilogram, stored quietly as latent heat inside each gram of vapor. It didn’t disappear. It traveled — invisible, unmeasured, underestimated —
until it condensed again, releasing all its energy instantly, locally, and often unpredictably.
This isn't an analogy for the climate system.
It is the exact mechanism by which water, when transformed into vapor, becomes one of the most powerful atmospheric transport agents on Earth.
Phase Change: The Overlooked Engine of Global Energy Transport
Climate models correctly emphasize radiative imbalance as a central driver of global warming. But in their precision, they often miss the mechanisms by which energy actually moves—not just as radiation, but as vapor. Water, through its phase transitions, may be the most under-credited force in the planetary heat engine.
Evaporation is energy storage.
Condensation is energy release.
Each gram of vapor carries 2.45 million joules per kilogram—silent, invisible, unmeasured—until it finds a place to condense. That moment of condensation does more than form clouds. It alters the structure of the sky.
This is why:
Hurricanes intensify explosively over warm ocean water.
Tropical forests cool themselves and their surroundings through vapor emission, initiating atmospheric draw.
Steam burns deeper than fire because it transfers latent heat directly into the skin.
But the atmospheric significance of this phase-state transport came into sharper focus with the work of Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov, who introduced a radical reframing: the biotic pump theory. In their model, forests do not simply participate in climate — they regulate it. Through sustained transpiration and subsequent condensation over the canopy, they create low-pressure zones that draw moist air inland from the oceans. The forest becomes an engine — not metaphorically, but mechanically — by leveraging the implosive force of condensation to generate pressure gradients.
This is not just theory. The model predicts pressure differences, wind vectors, and rainfall patterns with uncanny accuracy in forested regions. The implication is profound: remove the forest, and you not only reduce evapotranspiration, you collapse the mechanism that pulls moisture from sea to land.
And it is here that Peter Bunyard's experiments bring physical clarity.
Building on this insight, Bunyard designed an experiment to test whether condensation alone could induce airflow. In a sealed glass chamber, he introduced humid air, then cooled the upper boundary to induce condensation. Without any change in wind or external force, condensation alone triggered sharp increases in airflow inside the chamber. Cooling alone did little. But the moment condensation occurred — air began to move. Predictably. Powerfully.
This airflow wasn’t driven by rising warm air. It was driven by volume collapse — the implosive contraction of water vapor into liquid, reducing volume by a factor of 1,700 and creating an immediate local vacuum. This, in turn, drew surrounding air inward. The same mechanism that once powered the Newcomen atmospheric engine — where cooling steam created vacuum pressure to lift pistons — was now shown to operate at microclimatic scale.
The numbers were clear:
Cooling without condensation: negligible airflow (< 0.01 m/s)
Condensation active: sustained airflow > 1.0 m/s
Even though latent heat releases ~2.25 kJ/g during condensation, and the cooling effect of implosion is just 0.17 kJ/g, it is the latter — the vacuum effect — that drives circulation. The latent heat disperses. The implosion concentrates.
In Bunyard’s setup, this created localized winds. In the Amazon rainforest, it powers a biotic engine that pulls ocean moisture thousands of kilometers inland. Bunyard’s data aligns with observed 10 m/s winds entering the continent from the Atlantic — suggesting that the same principle applies across scales. The Amazon doesn’t just receive rain. It pulls it.
And yet, in engineered systems — such as hydroelectric reservoirs — we release vapor without the pump. Without the trees. Without the CCNs. The result? Vapor accumulates. Condensation is delayed. Implosions are weaker. Circulation stalls.
This difference matters. In natural systems, condensation completes the cycle. In engineered systems, it’s suspended — and when it does occur, it often does so at altitudes and timescales that bypass the vacuum effect. The latent heat still enters the system — but without the force that would have pulled the atmosphere inward.
So what happens when the sky becomes saturated, but cannot resolve its own saturation?
You get fog. Inversions. Stagnant pressure fields. Disrupted rainfall. And ultimately — the weakening of one of the planet’s most elegant feedback loops.
Anastassia Makarieva called it climate's biotic heart.
Peter Bunyard proved it can beat.
Now the question is: are we letting that heart stall in the name of clean energy?
But Before the Vapor — The Carbon
Not all emissions come from smokestacks. Some rise from drowned shorelines—where trees rot underwater, peat ferments in the shadows, and long-stored carbon begins to stir.
Hydropower is often sold as clean. Low-carbon. A benign partner in our planetary repair. But the reality beneath the surface is more complicated—especially in cold, boreal latitudes where decomposition slows, and methane waits like a delayed fuse.
In these regions, reservoirs behave less like batteries and more like biogeochemical reactors. Organic matter—trapped under still, anaerobic water—doesn’t simply dissolve. It transforms. Microbes feast. Methanogenesis begins. And in the absence of oxygen, CH₄—not CO₂—becomes the dominant emission.
And methane, as we know, is no minor character.
It’s more than 80 times more potent than CO₂ over a 20-year horizon.
Above the surface, a second emission pathway unfolds: warm water discharged from the dam interacts with -30°C Arctic air, releasing massive amounts of latent heat as vapor. This seasonal pulse of energy — uncounted in carbon inventories — travels downwind, contributing to Arctic amplification. Together, these two flows — gas below, vapor above — form an infrastructural climate feedback that standard models rarely capture, but nature already feels.
Here’s where the story tightens:
Some of the very same dams implicated in vapor-driven warming also carry some of the highest carbon footprints in the hydropower sector
For instance …
Brisay–Caniapiscau: Estimated lifecycle emissions of 2,265 gCO₂e/kWh, according to Scherer & Pfister (2016), which assessed the full biogenic carbon footprint of hydropower reservoirs in boreal zones.
Robert-Bourassa: Produces around 400 gCO₂e/kWh, as noted by Barros et al. (2011) and confirmed in Hydro-Québec’s internal assessments reported by McCully (1996).
Eastmain-1: In its first year, emitted at coal-equivalent levels (approaching 1,000 gCO₂e/kWh), before declining to natural gas levels (~400 gCO₂e/kWh) by year three, as documented in Teodoru et al. (2012).
These aren’t obscure or outdated installations. They are the crown jewels of Quebec’s hydroelectric fleet — feeding power into New York, Ontario, and beyond, under the banner of “clean” energy.
And their geography matters. Because these are the very systems that sit beneath the Arctic vapor corridor — the same plume that traces its way toward Greenland.
What this suggests is unsettling but increasingly undeniable:
Some of the most significant contributors to regional Arctic amplification may be dual-mode emitters.
They release long-lived greenhouse gases through their reservoirs — and short-cycle vapor through their turbines.
And both forms of emission—gas and phase-state—interact with the climate system in fundamentally different, yet mutually reinforcing ways.
One warms the planet slowly, persistently. The other modulates the thermal engine of the sky—its latent reservoirs, its pressure systems, its clouds.
