C:If so, do you agree that the apparent range of estimated forcing for the increase in atmospheric CO2 from 1850 to present is 0.30 - 1.30 W m-2?
AG: I will agree that global tropospheric temperature has increased less than 0.5 C since 1850 for numerous causes including changes in solar irradiation, albedo, & GHG's.
C: That's not what I asked. First you estimate forcing, then you try to assess the temperature change. As we both know, that's fraught with difficulty.
Since water vapor concentration and its effects on aldebo so tremendously outweigh all other considerations in atmospheric heat transport, the presumption of CO2 being a significant factor is tenuous at best.
As I have previously stated, CO2 concentration is predominately an effect of change in temperature and other causes, and not a substantive cause of temperature change.
The problem lay in the apriori attribution by some of CO2 as being a significant factor in the heat budget, and underplaying the role of H2O as a greenhouse gas and solar irradiation as the prime mover in the whole machine.
"The climate on its surface is completely out of line if you extrapolated the conditions as if they were Earth," said Fred Taylor, a planetary physicist at the University of Oxford, England. "There's something very wrong with our modeling.""