Sonoma State University
Date Written: August 25, 2018
Climate models predict that rising atmospheric CO2 will simultaneously warm the troposphere and cool the stratosphere. This combination of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling is found in the observational data over a period of rising atmospheric CO2. Although strong correlations between these time series are found in the source data, the correlations do not survive into the detrended series at annual or five-year time scales. The absence of detrended correlation implies that the correlations seen in the source data derive from shared trends and not from responsiveness at annual or five-year time scales. The results are inconsistent with the theory that rising atmospheric CO2 simultaneously warms the troposphere and cools the lower stratosphere.