The article I posted IS really the laymans version
I've not changed my mind on jopo's version of the olr story. Jopo's characterisation of this, consistent with the denial blogosphere, has been that olr is increasing therefore the whole of climate science has got it wrong. That has always been an unwarranted straw man extrapolation to an extreme. There are too many other lines of evidence that support AGW so you would expect an explanation regarding olr to be identified.
Have I changed my mind on olr? We spent quite some time discussing what we would intuitively expect to happen with olr and, it seemed to me, we largely showed that olr needed to continually be moving to equilibrium with incoming solar. And we also understood that as the planet warmed it would emit more radiation and this would balance out the reduction in olr from the greenhouse gas effect; that is how we would see the new equilibrium being achieved, a warmer planet with olr again in balance with incoming solar. Your link to that clever model on that was helpful. But, the details and time constants of all that we were never clear about. Certainly that seemed an open question to me. How quickly is the equilibrium re-established and olr again balanced to incoming solar? Could planetary warming overshoot and result in increased olr for a period that exceeded the greenhouse reduction in olr before the equilibrium was re-established? So whether olr should decrease or increase in various time frames was moot, in my mind. That was where I was with my understanding of this and jopo's posts just seemed to me to be making a meal out of a presumption. Albeit we were all aware that Trenberth had noted that there were some interesting things going on which were not as expected and hence needed better understanding.
What the latest stuff we understand from the science tells us is that, when you look in detail at what the models show us, the olr behaviour is not really a surprise, for the reasons explained in the paper and article. The increase in absorbed solar radiation, planetary warming and hence shortwave feedbacks are quite quick and that counteracts the intuitive expectation that olr would decrease.
Also, Jopo has associated this with his argument that there has been no water vapour increase, which all the published science that I've seen explicitly contradicts. So I've not given jopo's water vapour/olr story any credibility. And he has been fond of showing charts and arguing correlations with the southern oscillation index, which is a red herring at best. We've looked at his other denial bloggers irrationalities on that before. So I have not seen Jopo's story line as particularly measured or substantiated or supported by any particularly robust physical explanation.
