Joel, thanks for your reply and for raising the interesting question of what establishes an ELR. You give the explanation that self-correction through convection means it has to be less than the adiabatic lapse rate. So one imagines convection gradually working to create the equilibrium of the ELR. But it’s not like that. Day and night are totally different. The water vapour driven SALR destabilises. One can easily imagine a sunlit hemisphere continually covered with a roiling mass of convective thunderstorms desperately shedding heat in their chase for equilibrium while the nightside remains calm, quietly cooling. (It’s not like that of course; there are also many thunderstorms at night for a variety of reasons). But a theory that fails to treat day and night as chalk and cheese is in my opinion gravely deficient. To think in terms of averages is ludicrous. And basing climate theory on the properties of trace GHGs when water is overwhelmingly the dominant sun-driven agent causing the chaos of weather, leaves me, shall we say, sceptical.
↧