I might note in this regard that this blog was CREATED to address this issue. Go back to my first post, in 2008, ten years ago, before ClimateGate, and before the ice caps failed to do their job and disappear, or at least shrink precipitously.
And before I perfected and simplified my argument.
Here is the core, absolutely ineluctable reality: for atmospheric CO2 to act as a climate forcing agent the upper Troposphere has to warm at about three times the rate of the lower atmosphere. This is because the core hypothesis is that CO2 accumulation in the upper Troposphere will create runaway heating there which will then radiate back down, warming the Earth at surface level, melting glaciers, killing reefs, disrupting weather patterns and ocean currents etc.
This warming is easily detectable with satellites, which deliver continuous, reliable, and over the past 30-40 years or so, long term measurements. Patterns are easily seen. Evidence, if present, is damning and incontrovertible.
But it is not present. This region is warming and cooling at the same rate as the atmosphere as a whole. It is clearly not a factor. The hypothesis has been falsified, and should surprise no one, since CO2 only absorbs about ten percent of the radiant spectrum, and has already been blocking most of it for some time. It’s role asa “greenhouse gas” reduces by half for every doubling, and there have been many, many doubling.
That, in this non-debate, models are ALWAYS privileged over observation, should tell any thoughtful person all they need to know, not just about the “science”, so called, but about the people funding and pushing it.
Edit: one of the few rational arguments I hear is that the stratosphere is cooling. This means, logically, that less heat is escaping. However this is easily explained: as the Earth warms, more water vapor is produced. Water vapor is the PRIMARY “greenhouse gas”, and as such, will absorb more heat.
And what would drive heat, other than CO2? That fucking enormous ball of incomprehensible energy we see warm the sky every morning. Not complicated.
Earth has been covered in sheets of ice, and it has had no ice anywhere on it at all. Everything between us thus, logically, possible as natural, unforced, variation.