As I sit in my study at the end of the day listening to the heavy rain and wondering when I should open a bottle of red fluid that contains 85.5 per cent water, my mind strayed to that weird molecule we all take for granted. Water.

As soon as liquid water was on the planet’s surface some 4 billion years ago, life appeared. I suspect the same happened on Mars. Water dissolves more substances and in greater quantity than any other liquid. This allows cells to function. Water’s high light transparency allows photosynthetic life to live in deeper water.

Except for ammonia, water has the highest heat capacity of all solids and liquids. This prevents extreme ranges in temperature on Earth and allows a heat transfer in the oceans from the equator to the poles thereby giving us zoned climates. Heat transfer from the oceans to the atmosphere drives climate. If water did not have atoms held together by hydrogen bonding, it would boil at -30 degrees C and ice would be denser than liquid water. If ice was denser than water, oceans would freeze from the bottom up during ice ages and there would be no warm water currents. This would produce ice oceans that would reflect radiation producing a permanent iceball.

If ice is at 0 degrees C, it needs a lot of heat to convert it to water at 0 degrees C. If your choice of drink is whiskey, which contains 60 per cent water, when ice blocks are added the whiskey cools down by giving up heat to melt the ice. It’s far better to drink quality whiskey with no ice and two drops of that weird molecule to draw out the flavour. Evaporation and precipitation of water provide an upper limit to air temperature. It is evaporation and precipitation that buffer temperature on Earth because both involve an exchange of heat. It is the properties of weird water that stop a runaway greenhouse or permanent freezing of the Earth because the atmosphere operates like an evaporative air conditioner.

Townsville and Mount Isa are almost at the same latitude, the air in both places has the same carbon dioxide content and yet The Isa is far colder in winter and far hotter in summer than Townsville. This is because the air in the humid tropics at Townsville contains up to 4 per cent dissolved water in contrast to the drier air of Mount Isa. Forget carbon dioxide, water vapour accounts for at least 80 per cent of the planet’s greenhouse warming. Water vapour is the third-most abundant gas in the atmosphere whereas carbon dioxide is a trace gas with unremarkable properties.

The Earth’s climate system attempts to attain equilibrium but it is never exactly at equilibrium. The Earth’s surface has two turbulent fluids, the oceans and the atmosphere, interacting with each other on a rotating planet that is unevenly heated by the Sun and adsorbs solar radiation unevenly. This uneven heating drives atmospheric and oceanic circulation with heat in ocean waters transported from the equator to the poles. The atmosphere interacts with the irregular land surface distorting the airflow and heat-carrying ocean currents are diverted by the topography of the sea floor and the irregular shape of land masses.

Water as solid, liquid and gas changes from one state to another and this affects the heat balance. Each state of water affects incoming and outgoing radiation differently on time scales from seconds to thousands of years. If water was not weird, there would be no heat held in the atmosphere and oceans and the air temperature would be a balmy -18 degrees C. If the water cycle did not have positive feedback involving water vapour, clouds and precipitation, then there would have been no dynamic equilibrium of the Earth’s climate for billions of years.

The atmospheric carbon dioxide content has varied from 0.02 per cent to over 20 per cent yet all six ice ages over billions of years commenced when the atmosphere contained far more carbon dioxide than at present. Carbon dioxide had nothing to do with past climate changes and there is no reason to think that because we are alive today, then the physics and chemistry of carbon dioxide has changed.

Climate activists ignore the past, the states of water, clouds and heat transfer and claim that a trace gas emitted by Western industrialised countries controls global climate and that humans can change climate and the amount of this trace gas with taxation.

The only weird thing about carbon dioxide is that it has an inverse solubility in water. Cold water dissolves more carbon dioxide than warm water. Polar ice drill cores show that when past polar air temperature increased, some 650 to 6,000 years later the atmospheric carbon dioxide content increased. This is in accord with a law of chemistry and opposite to the popular belief that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide drives in an increase in atmospheric temperature. An increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide does not lead to global warming. It is the inverse.

Pour a champagne or beer and watch the carbon dioxide bubbles continue to rise as the drink warms up. This is exactly what happens in the oceans.

One needs to be a drinker to fully understand climate.