NASA has confirmed what’s long been suspected: that global warming begets more warming. As Earth’s surface temperatures rise, levels of water vapor in the atmosphere increase. More moisture in the atmosphere means more cloud cover, and more cloud cover only exacerbates the warming effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

According to NASA’s satellite data, over the past 12 years water vapor actually doubled carbon dioxide’s influence on raising global temperatures, an effect researchers described as significant. “It’s kind of an ‘inconvenient truth’—the models that are realistic all happen to be the ones that are predicting a very strong warming in the future,” Hui Su, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. The laboratory is located in La Cañada Flintridge, California.

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