The trillion dollar guess and the zombie theory - Climate Change: The Facts - page 116

Surprisingly, direct temperature observations from radiosonde and satellite data have often not shown this expected
trend. 29
[T]he tropical troposphere had actually cooled slightly over the last 20 to 30 years (in sharp contrast to the computer
model predictions) …' 30
(Most) models overestimate the warming trend in the tropical troposphere
… The cause of this bias remains elusive. 31
Shh, don't mention the water
To state the bleeding obvious, Earth is a water planet. Water dominates everything and it's
infernally complicated. Water holds 90 per cent of all the energy on the surface, 32 and both
NASA and the IPCC admit water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas there is. 33
They just don't seem inclined to produce posters telling us this is a humidity crisis, or that
water is pollution .
The untold horror of humidity
Floating invisible water molecules are up to 100 times more abundant than CO 2 (literally
40,000ppm vs 400ppm). And water vapour absorbs and emits across wider bands of the
infrared spectrum as well. Not to mention that there are even pools of liquid H 2 O known
to exist on the Earth's surface—like one called the Pacific. Meanwhile about 13,000 cubic
kilometres of liquid and solid water is suspended in giant fluffy clumps that cover 60 per
cent the Earth. 34 Each different incarnation of water has a different effect on the climate.
Down on the surface, liquid water is dark and absorbs almost all the energy arriving. Solid
water acts in exactly the opposite way—ice is like a mirror bouncing the energy back to
space. Up in the air, thick white low clouds cool the planet by shading it, while thin high
ice clouds have a net warming effect. There is no end to the contradictions. And you don't
need to be a scientist to know that cloudy humid nights are warmer, while cloudy damp
days are cooler. Dry air means temperatures swing more from hot to cold, while humid air
keeps temperatures stable. The effects are so large none of us need a thermometer to know
this.
When dada science became surreal science—the 'hot-spot' lives on
Even by 1990, the first searches for the hot-spot were hinting that it wasn't happening.
For the next twenty years scientists re-analysed the weather balloons in dozens of papers
to correct for every possible cooling bias they could find. With that path exhausted,