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Last winter, in one of the bleakest places on earth after Canberra and Belushya Guba, a novel hypothesis was proposed by a rogue researcher in lockdown: the more anthropogenic hot air spoken in the northern hemisphere before a United Nations climate conference, the colder it becomes in the southern hemisphere, especially at the South Pole.
The conjecture has yet to be validated by a peer-reviewed article in Nature Climate Change. Nevertheless, a lot of people – especially the self-appointed guardians of truth who call out “fake news” and “misinformation” — hope it never reaches that learned journal, and certainly not the smartphones or Twitter accounts of apoplectic activists and hysterical weather-worriers. They would prefer it just goes away and does not linger like a bad smell; or is buried deep under Antarctic snow and ice, with or without the perpetrator, before the Conference of the Parties 
(COP 26) begins in Glasgow-on-Clyde in November, with or without President Xi (editor’s note: Xi isn’t going, preferring to laugh at the participants from a distance.)
Yet the supporting evidence is impressive. The first part of the hypothesis is affirmed daily in the media, and by cartoons like this one at right, published by The Telegraph on October 14.
As for the second part, global warming took a long winter vacation, at least in Antarctica.
The Antarctic interior recorded its coldest April-to-September this year since records began in 1957. According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), the average temperature at the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was minus 60.9ºC for the six months. It was also the station’s second-coldest winter (June, July and August) on record, with an average seasonal temperature of minus 62.9ºC. This was an extraordinary 3.4ºC below the long-term average (1881-2010) for winter.
Antarctic sea ice extent also was above average for several months. In late August it was the fifth-highest in the 43-year satellite record. The maximum observed on September 1 was 18.75 million square kilometres (7.24 million square miles, over twice the size of Australia) and the second-earliest seasonal maximum in the satellite record. Ironically, it was “relatively cool” near the North Pole last summer, compared to recent years, which allowed September’s ice extent to be the highest since 2014.
On Thursday, September 30, climatologist Maximiliano Herrera tweeted:
Exceptional cold in the Antarctic Plateau. The Russian Base of Vostok on 30 September dropped to a min. temperature of -79.4C, which is only 0.6C above the world lowest temperature ever recorded in October (recorded at the former Plateau Station, also in Antarctica).
The jury is still out on precisely what caused the cold snap and its significance. According to NSIDC:
the unusual cold was attributed to two extended periods of stronger-than-average encircling winds around the continent, which tend to isolate the ice sheet from warmer conditions. A strong upper-atmosphere polar vortex was observed as well. (NSIDC, October 5, 2021)
How did the warmist MSM cope with news that must have ruffled a few feathers of that green canary in the coal-mine? The first step, as always, was to find an expert or climate waffler to hit the “anomaly” on the head and dismiss it as a nothing-to-see-here blip. The other option: simply to ignore it. They did just that four centuries ago, when Galileo Galilei asked a few members of the priestly class if they would like to see the moons of Jupiter through his telescope. He was later charged with heresy, placed in home quarantine, aka house arrest, and given daily injections of approved-truth serum. In 1992, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Pope John Paul II officially declared Galileo was right. It takes time, but some anomalies can turn a worldview upside down.
There was no mention of the record cold on our ABC. Perhaps I missed it. My search in the ABC’s online archives for the “South Pole and Antarctic winter temperatures 2021” produced, inter alia, the following: “Rare event over Antarctica driving Australia’s hot, dry weather” (9 Sep 2019); “How Pluto’s moon Charon got its red cap” (15 Sep 2016); “One year in Antarctica: Darwin teacher’s life surrounded by whales, polar caps and pirate parties” (3 Feb 2015); “Fact check: Rupert Murdoch misleading on North and South Poles” (12 Aug 2014); and. “Russia reaches ancient Antarctic lake” (9 Feb 2012). The surprise would have been if the ABC had reported a development that goes against its its institutional warmist grain.
The Washington Post, however, jumped the gun. Its weather gang made this post four days before the NSIDC announcement:
South Pole posts most severe cold season on record, a surprise in a warming world. While the rest of the world sizzled, the South Pole shivered with an average temperature of minus-78 degrees [Fahrenheit] over the past six months.
We first learned of this record through a tweet from Stefano Di Battista, who has published research on Antarctic temperatures. The legitimacy of Di Battista’s information was confirmed by Richard Cullather, a research scientist at NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, who provided a chart.
To prevent a pandemic of climate anxiety among nervous folk struggling to “process” the South Pole data, the Gang emphasised “the planet and Antarctica are still warming”.
Scientists stressed that the record cold over the South Pole in no way refutes or lessens the seriousness of global warming. Antarctica is notorious for its wild swings in weather and climate, which can run counter to global trends.
In other words, record cold is merely “weather”. Global warming is “climate”, even if there is no such thing as a global climate. The post included the following quotes:
Ted Scambos, senior research scientist, University of Colorado: “the Antarctic climate is extremely sensitive to high-altitude winds and Pacific Ocean conditions and prone to rapid change.”
Eric Steig, professor of atmospheric sciences, University of Washington: “One cold winter is interesting but doesn’t change the long term trend, which is warming.”
David Bromwich, professor of atmospheric sciences, Ohio State University: attributed the cold to increasing “short-term variability” at the South Pole in recent years. “In the long-term average Antarctica is warming.” Not only is Antarctica warming over the long-term, but its ice is allegedly “rapidly melting, contributing to sea-level rise”.
Allison Chinchar, a CNN meteorologist, stressed the difference between short-term weather and long-term climate:
scientists agree that since the 1950s extreme cold snaps do occur, but climate change is bringing far more heat records than cold records.
Yet, despite Ms Chinchar’s dismissal, the fact remains no “cold snaps” of this year’s magnitude have ever before been recorded at the South Pole or the Antarctic interior. Ms Chinchar then added this comment:
One great example of this is while June-August of this year may have been quite cold, February of the previous year recorded the new all-time record high for the Antarctic continent. On February 6, 2020, the Esperanza Research Station recorded a high temperature of 18.3°C degrees (64.9°F). This broke the previous record for the Antarctic region (continental, including mainland and surrounding islands) of 17.5°C (63.5°F) recorded in March 2015 at the same station. (CNN Weather, October 9, 2021)
As I explained in a post early last year, “Antarctica’s hottest day? Not so Fast”, the Esperanza base is actually 
outside the Antarctic Circle, which runs 66°33′48.0″ south of the Equator. It is misleading – some might say mischievously so – to imply that “record” temperature measurements on the Antarctic Peninsula – less than 5 per cent of the continent — and especially those taken on the “surrounding islands” at its northern extremity, are meaningful for the Antarctic continent itself.
Zack Labe, a climate scientist at Colorado State University, as did many expert warmists, waved away the record freeze: “While the globe may be warmer than average as a whole, some areas will still observe colder temperatures and even severe cold outbreaks.”
As for data that might challenge the warming orthodoxy, if you cannot identify its cause, if your model did not – and could not — predict it, you can stuff it in an attic labelled “natural internal variability”; or shove it down a memory hole even more efficient at banishing the inconvenient than Orwell ever imagined:
… it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon–not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words–which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes…
Winston dialled ‘back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of ‘The Times’, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, ‘to rectify’.
These days, of course, Twitter and Facebook are available, efficient and much faster than a memory hole for making unapproved arguments, heresies and even recent US presidents disappear.
A recent study concluded that Arctic warming is linked to colder winters. It claims to show that “increases in extreme winter weather in parts of the US are linked to accelerated warming of the Arctic.” According to one of its authors, Professor Chaim Garfinkel from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University: “There has been a long-standing apparent contradiction between the warmer temperatures globally and an apparent increase in cold extremes for the United States and in northern Eurasia. And this study helps to resolve this contradiction.” Except there was nothing “apparent” about the US cold extremes. They were real. Were there a Nobel Prize for such flights of fancy and rhetorical sleight of hand, Professor Garfinkel would be be a shoo-in.
Note the intriguing logic: warming can produce cooling. If so, then presumably evidence of cooling anywhere cannot be used as a counter-argument to challenge the global warming paradigm. A frigid winter, therefore, even on a continental landmass twice the size of Australia won’t be allowed to “mitigate the seriousness of climate change.” As Karl Popper argued last century, a theory that is not refutable or falsifiable by any conceivable event – one that is explanatory like Marxism or Freudian psychology or climate prognostication – is pseudoscience.
Even when no warming is detected, it is apparently still there, invariably “masked” by something else. That at least is what Clem, K. R. et al. suggested in their Nature Climate Change paper last year,”Record warming at the South Pole during the past three decades“, The summary (do notice the sentence underlined for emphasis):
Over the last three decades, the South Pole has experienced a record-high statistically significant warming of 0.61 ± 0.34 °C per decade, more than three times the global average. Here, we use an ensemble of climate model experiments to show this recent warming lies within the upper bounds of the simulated range of natural variability. The warming resulted from a strong cyclonic anomaly in the Weddell Sea caused by increasing sea surface temperatures in the western tropical Pacific. This circulation, coupled with a positive polarity of the Southern Annular Mode, advected warm and moist air from the South Atlantic into the Antarctic interior. These results underscore the intimate linkage of interior Antarctic climate to tropical variability. Further, this study shows that atmospheric internal variability can induce extreme regional climate change over the Antarctic interior, which has masked any anthropogenic warming signal there during the twenty-first century.
The “statistically significant warming”, of course, now looks somewhat less significant, given last winter’s 3.4ºC below the long-term average (1881-2010) a year later, not to mention projected global warming of 1.5C by mid-century. As for the proposed “intimate linkage of interior Antarctic climate to tropical variability”, it sounds like the butterfly effect in chaos theory on steroids. If you accept that renewable-energy witchcraft can change a planet’s temperature and climate, you will have no trouble linking intimately with this claim. (While warmists are an essentially dour lot, a correction published online on June 26, 2020, cannot help but raise a smile: “In the version of this Article originally published, in Fig. 4, the label ‘West Pacific cheating anomalies’ should have been ‘West Pacific heating anomalies’.)
The Clem paper was a treat for waqrmist bastion Carbon Brief, which posted about it on June 26, 2020, reporting the so-called “record heat” was driven “largely by natural swings in Antarctica’s climate”, according to study lead author Dr Kyle Clem, a polar researcher at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Dr Kyle Clem: Research over the past couple decades revealed the Antarctic plateau, the coldest and one of the most remote places on Earth, had been cooling while global temperatures were increasing … Our study has found that this is no longer the case. The South Pole is now one of the fastest warming regions on the planet, warming at an incredible three times faster than the global average rate. (Carbon Brief, 26 June, 2020.)
How odd, then, it still “appeared very likely that it worked in tandem with human-caused warming … Our results suggest global climate change very likely played a role, but it was not the dominant driver.” In fact, their modelling found that the warming “would have been possible in a world without greenhouse gas emissions – but only just.”
Climate Brief dodged the obvious question: how did Dr Clem’s team differentiate human-caused warming from the natural swings and roundabouts. It remains a mystery, at least to this author.
It took humankind most of its existence to wake up to the fact that the sun does not actually rise in morning. A few months of data from the South Pole, however important, is unlikely to deflate three decades of climate alarmism and Glasgow’s looming madness. The Church after all survived the heliocentric revolution, so will the Church of Climate Change. The greater human misery, the more seductive the promise of redemption, especially if a vast amount of other people’s money can be conjured up for the climate collection plate. The Church’s ancient indulgences have morphed into “carbon” (dioxide) credits, its Heaven as a Net Zero utopia.
As Galileo remarked, “People tend to refuse to consider evidence, if what they might discover contradicts their beliefs.” As he left the courtroom, it is said he whispered after being told what he observed could not be observed (or noted if it was), “All the same, it moves“. Minus 60.9ºC is rather chilly, especially on a warming planet, but observing as much will still get you the Galileo treatment.
It’s funny how Galileo saw the truth for what it is- the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – truth is an affront to worldly concepts of power- worldly power is based on manipulation and deception and a lie- example of which is the biblical idea of the temptation.
Can the idiot corporate Czar’s and their scientific and political ‘counter’- parts please explain to the ‘, how’ ,we arrive at a global sea surface temperature of 15 degrees Celsius and a pressure of 1013.2 mb?
Can these same fat buffoons please give me the reason for the why , as to ‘why’ the average lapse rate for cooling in the atmosphere is that of minus 2 degrees of centigrade for every 1000 ft rise in an average parcel of air from sea level up to a flight level FL 360 feet?
Can the same subscribers please share with us ,the Poseidon stock principle ,please explain to the ‘why’ how it is that from Flight level FL 360 to FL 600 that the atmospheric average temperature is isothermal at -56.3 degrees of centigrade?
Can our political meteorologists ( politicians and the anthropologist Mrs Timothy Flannery ( Flannels) please explain the temperature increases and that of decline mentioned ,that occur above the level of the stratosphere.
Could theY also ,please generously explain in terms of content , constitution by way of mathematical ratio and percentage the elemental and molecular compound makeup of the atmosphere and their reasoning behind the makeup?
Why is the volume and what is the reasoning for the constituent volume of the atmosphere – 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 0.93% Argon, 0.04% Carbon dioxide and the reason for trace amounts of Radon, Hydrogen, Helium, Krypton, Neon, Methane.
As to water vapour in air’s constitution ,what effect does this have on the humidity of the atmosphere and how does this and in what calculable way does this alter the rate that moist air cools in the troposphere?
Could they explain the affect that thunderstorm activity has on the regulation of as the yet unaltered global average sea surface temperature of 15 degrees centigrade?
And finally as a collective could they give us their reasoning ( consensus) behind their climate change that gives us their global warming- (CLUB).
IN SHORT THEIR CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIO THAT REVOLVES AROUND GLOBAL CONCEPTS ( elites) OF WARMING IS ALL INJUST, UTTER BS- a conversation piece ….
Brilliant, Michael.
I asked every politician the following two (now outdated) questions in 2012. Auspost has been a little slow heir mailed in replies are still on their way …
“The AVERAGE global temperature is currently a paltry 14.9° Centigrade.
What is the optimum average global temperature if any rise is thought to be somewhere between dangerous to catastrophic? Surely if we don’t know where we are going how can we formulate a realistic plan to get there?
Several years ago I did a rough study by trawling some websites on CO2 and its effects on humans and plants. The personal conclusion I reached is that 2,000ppm – 4,000ppm is the optimum level of CO2 for the majority of life on the planet, with a probable/maybe rise of 2° – 3° centigrade increase in temperature, mainly in the temperate regions. To help you out, please note that US nuclear armed submarines operate with a CO2 level up to 8,000ppm for extended periods without harm to the sailors breathing this concentration of CO2. The USN has set a maximum limit of 12,000ppm before they become concerned, so no doubt that still contains a safety margin.
So, to seriously answer the question I think we need MORE CO2 – and soon as the quiet Sun is going to cause havoc in the coming decades with global cooling the result. Ah, skiing in Melbourne, now that would send Flim-Flan Flannery and Garnaut into a new series of incantations would it not? I await your reply with interest, especially if you can explain your ‘scientifically settled’ answer with references to the science supporting your views.
However, if life is any indication then the optimum temperature (when life was at its most prolific) is about 18°C with an error bar of +2°C, but preferably at the higher end of the scale. This is >3°C warmer than at present.
In 1800 it is thought that the atmosphere contained about 280ppm. In 2012 it is 390ppm and rising by 2ppm/year.
So, as we must stop this dastardly gases inexorable rise, can anyone tell me the actual ‘tipping point’ concentration after which catastrophe is inevitable? An open goal for the cultists to score I would think. What will the temperature be at this point and at what level of CO2 will the temperature stabilise into boringly perfect weather?
What is the optimum level of CO2 in the atmosphere?
000ppm
100ppm
200ppm
300ppm?
As we are approaching 400ppm (currently 422ppm) it must obviously be less than that. Also, as plants stop growing at 250ppm the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ must be somewhere between the two. I am breathlessly awaiting the answer from a scientist climate deceiver, but I am not expecting to receive one any time soon.”
These kind of cold records are why the alarmists changed their label from global warming to climate change. That change neutralizes the cold record counter evidence for warming and becomes positive evidence for “change”. After all, who can argue that the climate doesn’t change. The geological evidence is that it has always changed, quite naturally. So while we have very obvious evidence for change, the system is far to complex to ascribe individual local trends to global factors with confidence, record cold in Antarctica and its relationship with manmade carbon dioxide being an excellent example. It follows that there is no real evidence that human action can influence climate, any more than human sacrifice to the gods benefitted the Aztecs.
A great post, Michael. The link below demonstrates why Tony Heller is not the Global Warmists’ pin-up boy. ‘Everywhere is twice as warm as everywhere else’ is well worth a few minutes of Quadrant readers’ time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUV8U3yBJ6U
Not only is there a record cold snap,,Antarctica has been cooling for the last 40years.
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/12/2/217/htm
From a reanalysis
‘The table above shows East Antarctica, which covers two thirds of the continent, saw a cooling of 0.70°C per decade over the past 40 years. In total that particular region has cooled about 2.8°C since 1980.
West Antarctica has cooled at a rate of 0.42°C per decade over the past 40 years.’
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/09/17/surprising-and-statistically-significant-cooling-trend-over-entire-continental-antarctica/
The CO2 hypotheses says that global warming will be most apparent at the poles and this is because CO2, a well mixed gas, will amplify the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere and that the effect will be seen mostly at the poles, increasing the average temperature of GASTA, the global average surface temperature.
From this finding in Antarctica,CO2 cannot be the significant universal driver of global warming.
It is notable that the scientists doing the reanalysis are Chinese and German.
For Chinese, perhaps ‘the science is in’ and they have rationally concluded that feedbacks are stabilising the climate, preventing catastrophic warming and the melting of Antarctica flooding Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.
For the Chinese a bit of warmth will be a good thing, better for crops and sheep.
For the Germans they could at least free themselves from the Russian gas monopoly and build a few nuke power plants.
In the meanwhile the Chinese may as well build wind turbines and solar panels and export them to the West, while building new coal fired power stations and not exporting their pocket, barge loaded nuclear power plants to Australia, to save the Liberals.
In 1978, The New York Times quoted an “international team of specialists” claiming the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.”
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In 1974, Time magazine warned that “another ice age” was imminent.
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In 1974, The Guardian warned “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.”
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In 1971, The Washington Post published a Columbia University scientist’s claim that the world could be “as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age.”
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In 1970, The Boston Globe ran the headline, “Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century.”
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Nowadays these same papers insist that the Earth is warming, “science settled”.
IM: “It follows that there is no real evidence that human action can influence climate, any more than human sacrifice to the gods benefited the Aztecs.”
A propos the Aztecs, this post may be of interest:
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2009/06/the-aztec-solution/
“Climate modelling of new data from the Aztec Codex Cihuacoatl has identified a relationship with important implications for global warming mitigation. The research suggests a strong causal pathway exists between climate change and Aztec rituals of “nourishing the gods” with blood sacrifice.”
“Discovery of the Codex’s missing first and last two pages in 2008, together with a hitherto unknown part of the second section, in the French National Assembly Library archives, is now attracting international attention. There are two reasons for this interest. The rediscovered trecena contain the most comprehensive Aztec data set yet found. They detail annual sacrificial numbers over the entire empire and relate them to crop harvests—predominantly maize, wheat and barley. The data set extends over 300 years, from the Early to Late Post-Classic Period.”
Actually the Antarctic hasn’t warmed for 70 years!
https://principia-scientific.com/study-confirms-antarctica-hasnt-warmed-in-past-70-years/
Go to climate4you online and you will see up to date graphs on many aspects of the worlds climate. Satellite measures of Antarctic temperature have not changed since these measures were first available in 1979
Thank you, Michael Kite, for your superbly helpful article.
A grave problem is that the warmistas have control over goverment climate records. It seems that their published versions are continually being falsified so as to create a specious impression that the globe has been warming since about 1870. How can we compete with such bureaucracy? We need a mighty public correction. How to get it?
Meanwhile on the east coast of Australia, it’s late October and we’re still waiting for Spring to prove that it’s actually arrived.
>” … how did Dr Clem’s team differentiate human-caused warming from the natural swings and roundabouts ?”
The answer we are given to that question, regarded anyway as an impertinence by the activists, is that empirical measurements are compared with modelled forecasts (note: NOT predictions, they’re dangerous) and the subtracted result attributed to natural variation.
In short, the argument is deliberately circular. Model forecasts *are* correct, as they are theory, not hypotheses, is the insistence. So any differences from forecasts are obviously masking from transient natural inputs.
And it is shamanistic pseudo-religion, too.
You point out further down that the Christian Church “survived” helio-centralism. The reason for that was the Church stands for Truth in all areas of knowledge, so eventually, it did come around to accept it. However, the Church of Climate Change is not standing for truth of any Absolutist kind. Hence it will eventually be mugged by the Absolute Truth.
I am sure Martin Kile will have to roast in Hell for the rest of eternity and beyond for this odious blasphemy
ianl: “In short, the argument is deliberately circular….”
Agreed. Bullseye.Thanks.
Remember the controversy about a global mean temperature “pause” several years ago?
There was a paper published online on June 19, 2017 – “Causes of differences in model and satellite tropospheric warming rates” – by Benjamin Santer, Matthew England, Michael Mann and others – more than a baker’s dozen, the number of authors.
The Santer et al. paper was revealing, both in content and timing. It tried to explain (in six pages) the divergence between actual global temperatures and those projected by climate models during the past two decades. It was a stunning admission. Their models were not infallible.
The divergence arose, the paper concluded, because they could not predict correctly the magnitude of certain so-called natural forcings, including solar intensity, volcanic activity and internal variability. As for model “sensitivity” to atmospheric carbon dioxide, it was ASSUMED to be correct.
Yes, a cheeky, fallacious argument. For if errors in model projections (aka “predictions”) could be explained away on this occasion by evoking “systematic deficiencies”, “internal variability” or the poor quality of real-world data, presumably they could be explained away in future by the gatekeepers of climate-truth and their masters. In other words, the hypotheses hard-wired into the models were unfalsifiable.
Heads we win, tails you lose.
See: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2017/12/climate-elfs-cheer-santer-pause/
This is a very well written article presenting the facts honestly and correctly. The low level of antarctic temperature is really no surprise. The actual mean temperature of the globe can only be obtained by a complete set of measurements at a large number of equally and quite closely spaced points on its surface. This is achieved by satellite measurements of the temperature of the atmosphere. This is actually taken by many measurements in well occupied regions but very few of these are near the poles. If there were as many measurements included in these cooler areas it is most likely that no warming would be observed although some fluctuation is inevitable given known changes in the sun’s surface, solar winds and in cosmic rays from space etc.
The main problem to be addressed is the use of the very silly model of the greenhouse-gas-free earth used by the IPCC and dreamed up by Manabe and others in order to try to establish the claim that carbon dioxide causes warming,
This model is also free of soil and air – a black weightless shell which re-radiates the energy received from the sun immediately while on its night side has a temperature of zero Kelvin, the absolute temperature scale for which 0 K = -273 Centigrade. A new meaningless temperature is also defined which bears no relation to the energy maintained in material on the earth. This is referred to as the Effective Emission Temperature (EET) from the IPCC, which is UNIFORM over the earth with no recognition of the difference between tropics and poles, simply representing that temperature if it existed, which would re-radiate instantly all of the energy received from the sun. Where there is no sunlight – at night time -the temperature is defined as zero Kelvin (see above). On the sunny side this temperature is 303 K, while the measurable, mean temperature is 288 K to which is related the energy in the surface substances of water and soil and also of the air. This ‘temperature’ (EET) is then imagined to be spread over the whole of the earth’s surface – still uniform everywhere, even at the poles. However, it now has a value of only 255 K (-18 C) to which is conveniently added 33 K (or C) to bring it up to 288 K as the mean temperature of the earth is known to be – even though it is defined and calculated originally to be a constant, it is now mysteriously transformed to be much higher in the tropics than at the poles.
If we use a realistic earth model, without greenhouse gases (GHGs), but with soil and air, these are is warmed by the sun in the daytime and retain their mean temperature (almost) over night to provide the known and measured temperature of Earth – not a greenhouse gas in sight. Add the greenhouse gases, CO2 and water vapour but there is NO FURTHER warming. John L. Nicol PhD (Physics)