Climate Dialogue has another of its learned coffee mornings up and running, this time examining the missing tropical hotspot in the troposphere. In it we learn from Carl Mears that

...the tropospheric hotspot is often presented as some sort of lynchpin of global warming theory. It is not. It is just a feature of a close-to-unstable moist atmosphere.

Now this is pretty surprising to me. If I recall correctly, the tropospheric hotspot was behind the big story of the IPCC's Second Assessment Report, the "discernable influence" of mankind on the climate; his fingerprints left all over the scene of the crime.

This is all rather reminscent of the Hockey Stick, which everyone now agrees is peripheral to the global warming hypothesis, but was nevertheless promoted by the IPCC as if it meant something.