You two have clinically insane perspectives on the physics. Both of you plainly don’t understand a thing about photonics, and especially are clueless on how Bose-Einstein statistical mechanics describes how electromagnetic radiation gets dispersed across an energy spectrum.
It’s a very straightforward concept that greenhouse gases have a scattering cross-section that can partially reflect specific bands of photon frequencies until they redistribute to maintain an energy balance. Nature will always juggle and redistribute the state space densities to conserve energy. This is analogous to how a black-body spectrum exists in the first place, as its all about redistribution of energies within a state space to maximize entropy.
I took the time out to run the Modtran code with two cases which I superimposed.
http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/2450/spectralenergybalance.gif
One curve has the nominal GHG atmospheric concentration such that the ground temperature sits at 300K. That is the jagged curve.
The other curve has all the GHG removed (CO2, H2O, CH4), and I had to lower the ground temperature by about 30 degrees before the areas under the two curves started to match.
For those that don’t understand calculus, the area under the curves is the integral of the spectral energy density, which is the energy that must be balanced for the two cases. I highlighted by yellow and green the areas where the two areas have to compensate each other. It is a bit lopsided on the topside because the tails also contain a differential on the bottomside, and those tails are not shown on this plot.
It is possible that discrepancies do indeed exist and that’s what constitutes the uncertainty in AGW. The uncertainty is not in the bulk of the GHG effect which clearly generates the largest fraction of the energy imbalance and the corresponding shift in temperature. Those spectral curves are real and they have been measured by satellite instruments. Hard to see how anyone can dispute that. Also hard to dispute is that there are only 4 known fundamental forces, electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The only way that energy can balance in the earth’s case is by the electromagnetic photons and their interaction with GHG’s and albedo. No amount of convection, lapse rate, condensation, evaporation, etc can change all that as those are internally conserved energy quantities. Sure, second-order effects play a role, but then again that is where the uncertainty lies, not in the bulk of the 33 degree shift.
Bottomline, I am not making anything up, just using the standard spectral absorption model that has been maintained for years. If you guys think the Modtran code is wrong, go develop your own version. If you think it was all pseudoscience that generated Modtran, then certainly all it will take is a bit of your “proper science” to clean it up. Ha Ha.
I have no stake in the AGW arena, contrary to my position on fossil fuel depletion, where I am putting it on the line. I just hate to see how crackpots and wackos can make a mess out of the physics.