In climate-change science, the dominant paradigm could be called the Greenhouse Effect hypothesis of global climate change. This attributes all or most of the observed global warming at the Earth s surface over the 140 years of the instrumented record to human-caused changes in the composition of the atmosphere.
Greenhouse is a phenomenon of the atmosphere.
Theory has it that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions trap heat in the lower atmosphere, and this extra warmth is redistributed, in its turn, upward to Space or back to the Earth s surface. It is this resultant surface warming which we call the greenhouse effect . Thus, if there is no prior warming of the lower atmosphere, there can be no consequent greenhouse effect attributable to it. A global coverage of satellite-derived atmospheric temperatures is now available for 22 years, revealing only a modest warming in the Northern Hemisphere and a slight cooling in the Southern. Although this longer record is largely over land and excludes the high latitudes, it agrees well with the global satellite data for their period of overlap.