Article Tags: Roy Spencer, World Temperatures
I sometimes hear my fellow climate realists say that a globally-averaged surface temperature has little or no meaning in the global warming debate. They claim it is too ill-defined, not accurately known, or little more than just an average of a bunch of unrelated numbers from different regions of the Earth.
I must disagree.
The globally averaged surface temperature is directly connected to the globally averaged tropospheric temperature through convective overturning of the atmosphere. This is about 80% of the mass of the atmosphere. You cannot warm or cool the surface temperature without most of the atmosphere following suit.
The combined surface-deep layer atmospheric temperature distribution is then the thermal source of most of the infrared (IR) radiation that cools the Earth in response to solar heating by the sun. Admittedly, things like water vapor, clouds, and CO2 end up also modulating the rate of loss of IR to space, but it is the temperature which is the ultimate source of this radiation. And unless the rate of IR loss to space equals the rate of solar absorption in the global average, the global average temperature will change.
Source: drroyspencer.com