Re: Um
The heat is not the problem, the problem is the heat equilibrium.
There is a distinction between heat and temperature that those who are not educated in the physical sciences may be unaware of. Namely heat is just energy in motion. The actual problem is 'Equilbrium Climate Sensitivity', or ECS. So how much additional heat is created for any given quantity of a a taxable commodity, in this case CO2, methane etc etc.
...heat the ground up, and are then radiated away, through black-body radiation at infrared wavelengths.
For CO2, there's pretty much only 4 of those. Three of which overlap with H2O. But 'black-bodies' are how the gish-gallop begins. Assume the Earth as a black body, calculate what it's temperature should be. Look at what the measured temperature is, and the difference is the 'greenhouse effect'. Which is trivially true, although the Earth never has been a black body (in an albedo sense) but an open, dynamic system with a lot of variables in play. Climate 'science' mostly ignores all those except CO2, and decides pre-1850 the Earth had an 'euquilibrium' temperature that we've disrupted. So hand over $100bn+ a year to the UN please.
You are right about energy being radiated away though from surface to atmosphere to space. Our 'greenhouse' doesn't have a roof on it you see.
There are components of the atmosphere that absorb infrared and are heated by them (such as CO2 and methane),
Don't forget water. There's a lot more of that in the atmosphere, and it massively dominates any effect from CO2, which is only present in the atmosphere in homeopathic quantities. But water is a better way to think about Global Warming. So you're sunbathing on a nice, clear sunny day. A cloud passes over. It gets cooler because the cloud is blocking some of the energy from the Sun. It doesn't get warmer because the clouds are re-radiating from surface to cloud to skin because the energy involved at the wavelengths in question is teeny in comparison to the total solar irradiance.
But you fell asleep, it got dark. If it's a clear night, it'll get colder than if it were cloudy. There, the effect of a cloud 'greenhouse' is more noticeable. It's even measurable. Yet climate pseudoscienttists fixate on maximum daytime temperatures, not night time. Probably because there's no statistically significant difference in Tmin that could be attributed to CO2. Plus of course marketing.
Main issue though is even if a photon from the ground hits a CO2 molecule, and is bounced back to the ground, it's going to radiate away again almost instantaneously, unless it's absorbed by something and not re-radiated straight away. IR is not well known for being able to do this, ie it doesn't penetrate deep into water, where other physical processes like conduction, convection, evaporation etc play a much greater role in heat transfer than radiation. Climate 'scientists' gloss over this by being flat-earthers and assuming 50% radiated up & down from atmosphere to surface. Reality is a CO2 molecule is going to emit a photon in a random direction, and as altitude increases, the probability of hitting the surface decreases.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
