Your premise is false. The Sun and atmosphere were not constant, and two regions behaving differently does not imply they were. Climate is a coupled fluid system; the atmosphere and oceans move heat around. You can absolutely have Greenland cooling while parts of North America warm under the same external forcing because changes in circulation redistribute energy spatially. That’s literally what climate models and paleoclimate data is built on. Heterogeneous response is a fingerprint of atmospheric/ocean dynamics, not evidence against them.
You’re creating a straw man with the “energy balance = no wind” claim. GMST isn’t a statement that Earth has perfect equilibrium at every moment. It’s a system level variable tracking the net energy content of the planet. Energy enters via solar radiation and leaves via longwave emission; winds, storms, and currents are just internal redistributions of that energy. They don’t violate energy conservation; they operate because of it.
You are misapplying planetary atmospheric physics. Mars and Pluto do experience pressure changes as their surface volatiles sublimate or condense, but Earth’s atmosphere is dominated by N2 and O2, which don’t condense or evaporate under climate relevant temperature changes. Global warming of a few degrees does not measurably increase the weight of the atmosphere, which is what determines surface air pressure. Using rising planetary pressure as a proxy for Earth warming or ice melt is simply wrong; it conflates local temperature effects on gas density with the mass of the atmosphere, which is effectively constant. The logic that “no rise in surface pressure = no warming = no ice melt” fails at both a conceptual and physical level.
You are closer to reality but also oversimplifying. Surface pressure is indeed the weight of the air column per unit area, and a kitchen siphon analogy doesn’t translate to the atmosphere because liquids are essentially incompressible while air is a compressible gas. Temperature affects air density and scale height, which enter the barometric formula, so local temperature changes do have a small effect on pressure at altitude, just not enough to act as a global warming indicator. Using a single household barometer or the barometric formula to claim average global pressure is uninformative for climate change is misleading. Earth’s surface pressure is overwhelmingly dominated by atmospheric mass, not by a few degrees of warming, and it is not a metric for ice melt or ocean rise.
You’re conflating local variability and latent energy with the system level concept of GMST. GMST isn’t trying to capture every nuance of weather, latent heat, or micro scale processes; it’s an integrated measure of the planet’s total thermal energy response to radiative forcing. Just like measuring the average kinetic energy of gas molecules tells you the temperature of a container without tracking each particle, GMST tells you about the energy content of the climate system without needing to resolve every wind gust or water droplet. Latent heat, pressure, winds, and humidity are already part of the system’s energy budget; GMST reflects their aggregate effect on the planet’s thermal state.
Convection and latent heat are already baked into the planet’s energy budget, so GMST doesn’t ignore them. It integrates their effects system wide. When energy evaporates water, it’s transported aloft and released elsewhere, but it still contributes to the Earth’s overall thermal state. GMST is not meant to track each droplet or wind gust; it measures the net energy content of the climate system, which is exactly what matters for understanding warming trends and climate response.
How the "average temperature" is determined and that appears some relevant factors ignored.
Both of you are circling the same misconception. You’re treating average temperature as if it were a casual arithmetic toy instead of a physically defined state variable in an energy system. GMST is not computed by giving Greenland and the Sahara equal votes; it’s already area weighted and based on spatial integration. One square mile does not balance five square miles because that’s not how the math is done in the first place. The whole point of a global mean is that each patch of the surface contributes in proportion to its actual area and measured temperature. This is exactly how you calculate the total thermal energy of any extended system in physics, by integrating over space, not by eyeballing extremes.
Convection is baked in because the climate system is governed by energy conservation, not by which physical pathway the energy happens to take. GMST is derived from the temperature field of the atmosphere and oceans, which already emerges from radiation, convection, latent heat transport, and circulation acting together. Those processes don’t sit outside the budget; they are literally the mechanisms by which the budget equilibrates.
