Difference in longwave radiation between top and bottom of atmosphere

I downloaded data from 1979 to today of NCEP reanalysis-2 of upward longwave radiation from this page. Look for the files that are about 30MB in size.

Slightly updated OLR graph

At first these NetCDF files with extensions like .nc and .cdf were a bit of a mystery to me. These files won't open in everyday programs I'm used to like Excel or text editors.  But I'm making progress manipulating them in Matlab.

A website I often refer to for OLR graphs is Ole Humlum's Climate4You.com's temperature page here (excerpt with just the OLR graphs here).

But I guess that page needs to be manually updated and was last updated 2011; the data stops around 2010. Here's the first OLR graph from that page with global coverage using NOAA satellites that started measuring in June 1974:

Outgoing longwave radiation basically follows air temperature

Just tinkering with a few climate-related files concerning outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) for an upcoming post.

Supposedly this OLR portion of earth's outgoing spectrum is curtailed by greenhouse gas "heat trapping" and should go down. Instead the opposite is found.

Basically OLR follows earth's average air temps as you'd expect and there is no CO2-related "heat trapping" evident.

The very existence of the tropospheric vertical temperature gradient nullifies the possibility of a greenhouse effect

Scientists such as Luboš Motl believe a greenhouse effect exists in the atmosphere because of the existence of a negative vertical temperature gradient, which averages -6.5C per kilometer of altitude (adiabatic lapse).

Tropospheric negative vertical temperature gradient (right)

Why David Evans' greenhouse effect definition can't work

On the Jo Nova website is a recent attempt to portray a greenhouse effect:

Source: New Science 6: How the Greenhouse Effect Works and “four pipes” to space