WSJ.com – Science Journal
“If you turn up the sun’s energy output, the atmosphere should warm from the stratosphere to the surface,” says Dr. Santer. “That’s contrary to what’s observed. But greenhouse gases do not produce a uniform warming. They warm the troposphere and cool the stratosphere.” (See the Data) (And the Report)
Another signature is the pattern of warming in the seas. Some 84% of the total heating of Earth over the past 40 years has gone into warming oceans about 1°. (The 84% comes from calculating the heat needed to melt glaciers and warm air and water; oceans, being so huge, suck up most of the heat.) In theory, a hotter sun could be the culprit. But the sun has increased its energy output less than 0.1% over that time, according to satellite data. That isn’t enough to explain even a few percent of the warming, says marine scientist Tim Barnett of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif., who led a 2005 study on ocean warming, published in Science. (More from Woods Hole)
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