Tony, I think you are in serious error in writing off the ocean data so clearly. Yes, it has been less robust than we’d like, and it’s a “travesty” we don’t have been data to deeper levels, but overall it is not nearly as bad as you paint it to be. We certainly know the trend, even if the specifics have uncertainty bands which we’d expect anyway. The oceans have been warming over the past 40+ years, steadily. This is not something any serious ocean-climate expert would refute.
Secondly, the energy gain in the oceans far outweighs anything the atmosphere even could store. The atmosphere has very low thermal inertia, is far more subject to short-term noise, and stores far less energy than the oceans. This complete fixation on the troposphere (by some) I find most interesting, as the physics behind increasing greenhouse gases simply say how much the energy imbalance the system will see with a certain increase in a specific greenhouse gas. it is the models (not the theory) that say where that energy will go. The models obviously (and admittedly, even by Trenberth) are wrong, and are wrong from the very start. But they can still be useful, just like a map is not the territory, but maps can still be useful.