incredible ...
> and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space....[snip] ... ' AC
>
> Cockburn has it exactly backward. The upper atmosphere does not transfer
> heat to the surface. It's the surface that heats the atmosphere.
>
the greenhouse effect is a little different from the blanket/insulator model .. in the case of cooler gases, they still can radiate energy to a warmer surface, it's just that they absorb from the surface more than they radiate ... the NET effect is that surface radiates to the atmosphere.
but look at the numbers: 492 W/m^2 is radiated away by the earth's surface in the infrared, for comparison, only 235 W/m^2 of solar radiation strikes the *top* of the atmosphere, while 324 W/m^2 is radiated from the atmosphere back down to the earth's surface (cf. "sylas"). the NET energy IS radiated upwards, but without that CO2 (and H2O) absorption, the surface and atmosphere could run cooler.
i wonder how these clowns would explain the high temperatures on Venus ...
> I looked up this article and found it was disputed to near derision,
> especially among the math-physics crowd.
they make some serious errors. but also, the errors are very clever. for example, attacking the heat engine description of atmospheric physics. these guys know the right words to make their article SOUND serious. except they have completely non-understood the heat engine description.
these kinds of clever arguments WILL be effective in being distracting ...
by the way, there ARE measurements of the radiation fluxes at the top of the atmosphere.
Les