Figure 2. Satellite, weather balloon (5,000-30,000 ft.), and surface temperatures since 1/1/79, the beginning of the satellite record.

My research shows that this warming below 5,000 feet is largely confined to the winter half-year (October-March in the Northern Hemisphere, April-September in the Southern); as Figure 3 shows, the ratio of winter-to-summer warming is greater than two-to-one.

dryness they have very little "natural" greenhouse effect and are consequently "warmed" (if

changing the temperature from -40° C to -38° C can be called a "warming"!) more rapidly than moist, summer air.

accepted) shows that over three quarters of the winter warming is confined to this very cold air. When we compare the average postwar warming in the statistical gridcells that comprise these airmasses to those that don't, the result is truly stunning. The coldest air is warming up a rate 10 times larger than the remainder of the hemisphere; see Figure 5. That research also proves that the warming is largely confined to the cold air masses, and that the more severely cold they are,

is in the most profoundly cold continental air that we know of. If this is the work of carbon

Together, these findings also demonstrate a persistent, damaging, and pervasive error in all climate models, including those that serve as the basis for the Kyoto Protocol.

Figure 6 shows the projected quarter-century warming from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) climate model incorporating greenhouse warming and sulfate cooling (addition of stratospheric ozone depletion changes the result very little), as originally published by Santer et al. (1996). This finding, more than any other single result, served as the basis for the 1995 IPCC statement that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate". However, there is no reason to single out the LLNL model except for its wide availability; every other one behaves in a quite similar fashion.

Figure 6. Warming predicted for today's change in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols by the LLNL model. Note that the entire zone from 5,000 feet to the stratosphere is predicted to have warmed.

The LLNL model and all others are clearly making an egregious error that renders the magnitude of their predictions of global warming virtually useless: They all have dramatically failed to

predict what happened between 5,000 feet and the bottom of the stratosphere. This comprises over 80% of the troposphere, or the earth's active weather zone.

Our chart shows the observed warming in this zone (as published by Santer et al., 1999) for various upper atmospheric records vs. the average warming predicted the current suite of climate models. There is no statistically significant warming in the observed data since the satellite/balloon concurrency in 1979, while the models have an average warming rate of 0.23°C/decade (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Model-projected average tropospheric warming (left) since 1979 vs. observed values published by Santer et al. (1999).

In other words, the models have been wrong for the last quarter-century-the period of greatest greenhouse gas increase-over 80% of the troposphere.

The atmosphere is a mixed fluid; the behavior in one vertical level depends in part on behavior in others. It is profoundly troubling that, for the last quarter-century, that projections of surface warming are much closer to observed values, than what has been observed in the remaining 80% of the troposphere. This differential calls into question the validity of any projection, surface or otherwise coming from these models. More important, it indicates that the "sulfate-greenhouse" paradigm is so inaccurate that it misspecified almost all of the troposphere.