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RE: Causes
By Spherical on 4/15/2008 6:30:00 AM , Rating: 2
RE:"At the top of the atmosphere, the balancing up flux is IR only, and the atmosphere there must be warm enough to emit it."

But temperatures in the upper atmosphere have not changed significantly and the stratosphere has a convection cycle, just as the troposphere has. The refrigerant gasses are still behaving very much as refrigerants, not insulators.

RE:"So with a constrained top temp, and a higher gradient, the bottom of the atmosphere must get warmer."

As a gas rises in the atmosphere, its pressure falls. As the pressure falls, the gas cools, so it must be emitting infrared radiation. Most of that radiation is going out into space from the top of the atmosphere. I haven't see anything to suggest that the heat is being "trapped" anywhere. If heat were easy to "trap" we would have far more efficient engines, generators, et cetera.

I think that there are several things at work here. First, our means of measuring temperatures is badly skewed because so many of our weather stations are badly placed or have been encircled by urban development. Second, we dump billions of calories of waste heat into the lower atmosphere day in and day out. Three, we obviously have not been doing a very good job of measuring solar flux.

I do not see how carbon dioxide can be the culprit. It is a refrigerant, not an insulator.


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