Talk:Climate Change/Science/Sun's Influence on Earth

The claim that the atmosphere "makes the earth warmer" cites as evidence that the global mean temperature is about 10 degrees higher, but that appears to be an unfair comparison. Given that the Stefan-Boltzmann Law has a T^4 component and the temperature distribution of the Earth is non-uniform, one cannot compare the blackbody temperature of a fictional earth to the average temperature of the current one.

Instead, one should calculate the fourth root of the average value of T4 to make a fair comparison.