The “convective adjustment” is symptomatic of the myopia that has afflicted climate modellers for decades. While numerous experiments have shown repeatedly that evaporation trumps all other mechanisms in transferring thermal energy from surface to atmosphere on an oceanic planet, they persist in their reliance upon academic radiative transfer theory as the backbone of their models, with other mechanisms relegated to a pesky afterthought.
BTW, since water vapor is lighter than air, buoyancy forces alone are sufficient to sustain moist convection. Nor is an unstable atmosphere required for thermally forced dry convection; an unstable environmental lapse rate merely indicates conditions wherein convection takes place spontaneously until hydrostatic balance is restored. Interestingly enough, nearly a century ago Robert Emden showed rigorously that an absorptive atmosphere in radiative equilibrium is necessarily top-heavy; i.e., is not in thermodynamic equilibrium. Thus the pesky step-child of convection continues to bite the fathers of “climate science” in more ways than one.
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