So you are claiming that holding all other factors constant, decreasing stratospheric temperatures will cause global warming?
I have no idea where you are coming up with this person named Bill. It is not a letter, it is a government required report. What is your basis other than 'I don't agree' for saying the quoted source is misunderstood. Have you read the source? What is clear is that all the reviews whose qualifications I have posted do not believe it is misunderstood or wrong, otherwise they wouldn't have put their name on it.
I understand this but you tried to argue that the % contribution of warming in the stratospheric from CO2 and water vapor was of some importance. The greenhouse effect is dominated by the heating in the tropospheric. I omitted the sentence about the tropospheric in my original post because it was of little importance. You tried to make it out this was somehow being deceitful.
Sorry it was Haroki who tried to cite a public submission from a guy with no qualifications who misunderstood another source. Which report are you citing, and for what purpose?
It is. The great joy of the CO2 molecule is that it re-emits radiation in a random direction (ie. often downwards.) It did seem odd that you would omit that CO2 is responsible for 80% of the warming in the stratosphere, from your own source.
Your calculation may work in some range but as you move the extremes of that range it reaches a tripping point and some other mechanism becomes dominant otherwise temperatures would never decrease like history shows they do. What is this other mechanism? It must be accounted for. An analogy to your and Dave's explanation of the system would be a microphone/speaker system (global warming) and a source of sound (CO2). If feedback (higher temperatures-->more water vapor-->even higher temperatures-->even more water vapor ) begins to occur it only increases until it reaches a threshold, the maximum output of the amplifier (some limit where water vapor absorbs all radiation) unless some other mechanism like moving the microphone away from the speaker exist. What is this other mechanism in the global warming system and why do you chose not to account for it?
"Carbon dioxide adds 12 percent to radiation trapping, which is less than the contribution from either water vapor or clouds. By itself, however, carbon dioxide is capable of trapping three times as much radiation as it actually does in the Earth's atmosphere. Freidenreich and colleagues have reported the overlap of carbon dioxide and water absorption bands in the infrared region. Given the present composition of the atmosphere, the contribution to the total heating rate in the troposphere is around 5 percent from carbon dioxide and around 95 percent from water vapor." --Energy Information Administration; Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/environment/appd_d.html
Don't change the subject. Account for the accuracy of the formula. It shows in very simple terms that all you need to predict temperature anomalies within a reasonable range of their actual occurrence is the change in CO2 levels since 1959. I've had enough, more than enough, of all this obfuscation. You know what the data very clearly shows. Math is math is math, and shows very precisely that CO2 is the major force accounting for the warming of the planet since the 50's. Account for the accuracy in some other terms, or give up and admit that all you need to explain present-day warming is CO2.
This model does not agree with the historical data. If there is not a mechanism to reverse the feedback process and since water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas the system would never be able to reverse itself and we would have reached and stayed at that 6 degree above normal limit temperature hundreds of thousands of years ago.