We're trying something different.

As you may know, we occasionally do a special article for our paid subscribers. These articles are typically longer and more technical than our normal articles.

Usually, a Sweet Lightning article takes about three or four minutes to read. But some topics are deep, and demand more room. These topics are also sort of sticky, too: one point leads to another and to yet another, and before we know it the whole task of writing has gotten long, nuanced, and complicated. The "exit" was hard to find.

Some topics are just like that.

These larger articles can take ten or fifteen minutes to read, and we tend to reserve them for our paid subscribers as a bonus.

We've been working for a while on the role water vapour plays in the complicated thermal engine of our atmosphere. It's not straightforward by any means, mostly because water is such an odd substance, with forms or sudden changes in state that absorb or release or reflect energy. It's turned into one of those "deep and sticky" subjects. Lots to write about. Hard to stop writing once you start.

Even so, we have finished the article: "The Greenhouse Gas No One Talks About." If you are a paid subscriber, you can read it here.

Once the article was ready to put on our website, we looked at it and said, "You know, a lot of people don't know much about this at all. But they should: it's pretty important."

So, we wrote a second, smaller article that deals with the same topics, but in a much simpler and more straight-forward way. The deep-and-sticky version is much more complete, but the shorter version only takes a couple of minutes to read and gives you the "trivia night" version of the topic, "The Nuance of Greenhouse Gas." You can read it here.

So, bookend articles that deal with the same topic. One is deep and treats the topic thoroughly. The other is a quick, easy read.

Rather than send out each article separately and fill up your mailbox, we decided to send out a single note about them both.

We're excited about this new "paired story" approach (or "pared story" approach, perhaps). We hope both versions will illuminate a seldom-discussed topic: the role of water vapour in our climate.

Thanks for reading Sweet Lightning.