Models for CO2 warming had to be changed in 2004 when the troposphere did not warm faster than the surface.?

They are talking about the mid troposphere I believe at about 10,000 meters at the equator. Supposedly the air warms up from CO2 and that increases the amount of water vapor in the air. It obviously doesn't increase the amount of water when the greenhouse effect for water vapor warms the air or their would be runaway warming in a positive feedback tipping point. Somehow the air magically knows that is being warmed by CO2 and acts differently. That way they get a positive feedback with water vapor increasing from warming from CO2. That extra warmed air will then rise faster by convection currents because that is how heat is transported from the ground. CO2 absorbs most of its bands in the first 10 meters. Water vapor absorbs the heat from the ground in much less distance so the thermal radiation is blocked. To get warming, they need to have it emit the heat at a higher altitude. I am not an expert at what alarmist say. It seems so irrational to me that I have a hard time keeping it straight. Basically, I believe it should warm faster because the warmer greenhouse warming will push harder with more heat at the surface so rise higher putting it crudely.

Christy may have made a mistake in saying the mid troposphere was cooling but it's supposed to be warming much faster than the surface which was also warming. It sounds like typical alarmist misinformation. It isn't relevant that it warmed or cooled. What is relevant is the relative warming was less than the surface and not much greater as predicted by the models.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/greenho...

"The surface of the Earth does not cool primarily by thermal radiation. The main greenhouse gas, water vapor, generally maximizes at the surface in the tropics and sharply decreases with both altitude and latitude. There is so much greenhouse opacity immediately above the ground that the surface cannot effectively cool by the emission of thermal radiation.

Instead, heat is carried away from the surface by fluid motions ranging from the cumulonimbus towers of the tropics to the weather and planetary scale waves of the extratropics. These motions carry the heat upward and poleward to the “characteristic emission level” one optical depth into the atmosphere, known as τ=1. From here emitted thermal radiation can escape to space. Crudely speaking, the emitted thermal radiation is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature at the characteristic emission level."

No offense Dana, but where is the proof that the #1 green house gas is not the driving factor? So far no scientist has come out and explained the effects of water vapor on climate change especially since water vapor makes up a grand total of 95% of all green house gases and only 1% of the 95% is man made. Also from my understanding all the charts and statistics show that CO2, methane, and other green house gases lag behind temperature change not drive it. Can the man made crowd come up with any proof that doesn't ignore past climate history, doesn't use computer models that dumb down the Earth into one variable or few variables causing climate change? Finally, how does the fact that man's total contribution to green house gases is at most 3% driving the climate change off of a cliff? For the person bringing up peer reviewed articles again, all that means is that people agree with your work, not that it is accurate or good science. There is a big difference and the scientific community has gone away from doing real research into doing research that brings in the most money. I have family that are into scientific research.

I agree with your assessment. It is not the modeling that they are doing nor the changes that they are making. It is the certainty with which they are stating their conclusions. Computer modeling of a chaotic system like the climate is difficult in the short term and becomes impossible for long term predictions, yet they state certainty for 100 years out. Their models are constantly being rewritten to the point of having 23 models. This leads me to no confidence at all. Because even if one of their models make accurate predictions. They still haven't demonstrated that their model is correct, only that one model out of the 23 is the best. It would be like stating that I am great at picking the Super bowl champions when I pick 23 different possible champions.

All of this lack of knowledge should not lead one to state your conclusions with such certainty that all who disagree are labeled idiots. This is simply not how science is done.

The study referenced in the blog you link to was wrong. It was disproven as discussed here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008...

Or you can read the study which disproved it for yourself here:

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/...

Basically the paper discussed in your referenced blog greatly underestimated the uncertainties involved in the instruments whose data they used, and consequently arrived at an incorrect conclusion. Or as Gavin Schmidt put it,

i) the statistical test they used was not appropriate and

ii) they did not acknowledge the true structural uncertainty in the observations.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008...

*edit* "All of this lack of knowledge should not lead one to state your conclusions with such certainty...."

The ironic thing here is that it's the "skeptics" (Douglass et al.) who were overstating the certainty, not the "alarmists". CO2 expeller is exactly wrong.

To Summarize, the finding in 2004 was; Instead of the warming which was predicted by theoretical models, the test data collected from the study was showing a cooling trend.

That's the 24 trillion dollar question, climate models predict the tropical mid troposphere should warm faster than the surface, it did not!, but don't worry you should still trust the climate models to predict what the climate will do 100 years into the future.

Yeah, Ok right, don't blame me if I'm still skeptical.

That is what some of us have a problem with current climate scientists. They have their models not work and then they rewrite them and say the exact same thing. You can't rewrite your models for 15 years and not be believed.

Technically, the troposphere is the surface. But CO2 in the mesosphere will increase global warming undoubtably. Thats where all this extra heat is coming from.

Sorry but the lower atmosphere is the troposphere, the mentioned area in the blog "especially in the layer from 5,000 to 30,000 feet" is the stratosphere.

The simple answer is, using a reference from a blog well known for it's denier leanings that date back to 2004 is always a bad idea, the original work showing cooling was done by John Christy (well known and quoted by deniers)

The problem is, that work was followed up and shown to be incorrect, a point that Christy himself has admitted and accepted.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725134.400...

But please feel free to deny this, and give me lots of thumbs down.

Average College Student: The Mesosphere is above the Stratosphere at 50-90km and well above the troposphere it is doing what climate models predicted it would do (cool)

http://www.aad.gov.au/default.asp?casid=11451

Duuurrrrr!!! I can do math with doctored numbers. Errr. My sample size is 2 durrrr!