[Windguy]

Originally Posted by Wowbagger

During the day, if it's very hot, there won't be as much of condensation, because the greater energy prevent water molecules from forming H-bonds. This doesn't matter however, because they will do during the night. The humidity in the air doesn't just disappear because it's hot. Eventually it will fall down as rain or condensate directly on the plants during night time.

The amount of water released in the atmosphere by evapotranspiration is the same amount of water released from the atmosphere by rainfalls if the humidity saturation is constant.

When you say "The lower the temperature difference between ocean and land winds, the less clouding and rainfall occurs and the higher the humidity before clouding and rainfall occurs", it really doesn't mean there's less rainfalls. It means simply that less clouds are forming somewhere comparatively to somewhere else. Let's say that at the current temperature, 1 cloud forms oversea and 2 clouds form over the continent. If global warming occurs, we could have 2 clouds forming overseas and 3 clouds forming over the continent. So the relative amount of clouds forming over the continent, in the global warming case, is lower, but the absolution amount is higher. What we care about is the absolute amount, not the relative one.

With convection, you'll always get clouds no matter what. Water can't stay in the gaseous form forever. So the more energy, the more evapotranspiration and convection there is, and more rain.

Yes we do only care about the absolute amount. Now to get clouds and rain you need humidity to be pushed past 100%, so cool nights and/or cool ocean breezes do that well. By having more trees, you see the speed it gets to near 100% humidity happens a lot more quickly so the cool down of an afternoon could trigger the rain more often. Therefore lowering the overall humidity average. Planet wide we maybe talking only 0.5% but that and AGW could really multiply together and cause what we are seeing quite easily.