Everyone intuitively understands the water cycle. Some days water falls from the sky, some days it doesn't. Gardens wilt when no rain falls and thrive when they can drink regularly. Lake and river levels rise and fall depending on how much precipitation has come down in a given period of time.
Water moves from sky to ground to basins and plants back to sky, endlessly. There's little on Earth that moves so easily, in such quantities, with so much influence; water is one of the most easily transformed substances. Water regulates global climate. As a conductive medium, water carries vast quantities of heat toward the poles, away from the warm tropics of Earth's mid-latitudes. It also moves heat in the atmosphere, responding to as well as influencing changes in surface temperatures.
LOOP presents the water cycle from a global perspective. Midway through the movie, LOOP shows a set of matching data layers, depicting a direct relationship among water vapor, cloud formation, and rainfall.
It's often not the raising or lowering of temperature that matters so much in terms of heat exchange. It's the moment of transformation between states of matter that counts.
In terms of energy exchange in the atmosphere, water and heat are essentially the same thing. Evaporation pulls heat away from the surface of the planet and condensation releases that heat. This is the same reason for why a person cools off when he or she sweats. Evaporating moisture pulls heat away from a body, no matter if that body is out running a road race…or a blue-green planet turning in space.
