boundary conditions
a boundary condition is a term from mathematics. when you solve differential equations you have to apply the appropriate boundary conditions. if you don't you'll get the wrong answer. /wrong/ in this case could mean really completely wrong or your solution is an approximation that's reasonably good over some range. the basic equations governing climate change were written down some 80 years ago. the original derivation used the wrong boundary condition. they assumed the atmosphere is infinitely thick. made the math easier. and it's a pretty good approximation. given that the atmosphere really is quite thick. however it led to the obviously incorrect conclusion of infinite global warming. which clearly cannot be reality. the earth would have cooked to a cinder long ago. so anywho, someone recently added the missing terms and lo and behold, the infinite feedback thing went away. whew. the world has been changing within the error bars of the old climatological models. but there has been fairly consistently less change than predicted. i'm gonna go out on a very thick limb here and say the derivation will put things right on the money. so rejoice! instead of boiling the oceans temps can only go up a maximum of 7C. averaged over some 1m years. which is still really frikken hot.