Nope. Here are Spencer's own words:
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In 1896 a Swedish scientist published a new idea. As humanity burned fossil fuels such as coal, which added carbon dioxide gas to the Earth's atmosphere, we would raise the planet's average temperature. This "greenhouse effect" was only one of many speculations about climate change, however, and not the most plausible. Scientists found technical reasons to argue that our emissions could not change the climate. Indeed most thought it was obvious that puny humanity could never affect the vast climate cycles, which were governed by a benign "balance of nature." In any case major change seemed impossible except over tens of thousands of years.
In the 1930s, people realized that the United States and North Atlantic region had warmed significantly during the previous half-century. Scientists supposed this was just a phase of some mild natural cycle, with unknown causes. Only one lone voice, the amateur G.S. Callendar, insisted that greenhouse warming was on the way. Whatever the cause of warming, everyone thought that if it happened to continue for the next few centuries, so much the better.
In the 1950s, Callendar's claims provoked a few scientists to look into the question with improved techniques and calculations. What made that possible was a sharp increase of government funding, especially from military agencies with Cold War concerns about the weather and the seas. The new studies showed that, contrary to earlier crude estimates, carbon dioxide could indeed build up in the atmosphere and should bring warming. Painstaking measurements drove home the point in 1960 by showing that the level of the gas was in fact rising, year by year.
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Nothing about ice cores all the way through the 1960's, long after the theory of climate change had been developed.
3) the increased radiative properties of the atmosphere cause it to radiate long wave energy more easily.
Well, greenhouse gases do the opposite; that's how they work. (They reduce re-radiation of IR.) However we can test this pretty easily - use satellites to observe incoming and outgoing radiation. Over the past 20 years scientists have done this, and seen a gradual decrease in amount of energy being re-radiated into space - without much of a change in incoming radiation.
4) increased absorption of IR in the lower atmosphere causes more convection which moves heat and latent energy to higher levels in the atmosphere where it can outradiate more easily.
Also a potential theory, but contraindicated by the actual scientific evidence.
