A blog named the "hockey shtick" has an article that posted on September 19th, 2015 called "Why greenhouse gasses don't trap heat in the atmosphere". It is written by a regular poster there named KevinK.
He explains why the Arhennius theory of the greenhouse effect is a fiction in that it confuses the cause with the effect where the actual cause is the gravito-thermal greenhouse effect and the actual effect is the IR absorption and emission of IR active greenhouse gases. The gravito-thermal greenhouse effect is described in detail in the peer-reviewed paper (the 33C gravito-thermal greenhouse effect of Maxwell, Clausius, Carnot, Boltzmann, Feynman, US Standard Atmosphere, the HS greenhouse equation, et al). This paper gives the real reason for the 33C difference between an earth with no atmosphere and an earth with its present atmosphere as opposed to the one espoused as "common knowledge".
He starts his article with a response to Mike Jonas who wrote "At last we come to something which is quite well understood. The ability of CO2 to absorb and re-emit a specific part of the light spectrum is well understood and well quantified, supported by a multitude of laboratory experiments.
Yes indeed this is not in doubt. However, the result of this phenomenon in the climate is still very much in doubt. Especially with regard to the average temperature. Aside from the fact that an average temperature has no useful meaning. I’m reminded of the old observation that if one of your feet is in ice water and the other is in boiling water you are on average quite comfortable overall.
Here is where the alleged GHE breaks down. There are numerous examples of human designed optical systems (aka applied radiation physics) that exhibit back radiation. Including the optical integrating sphere and the multi layer optical interference filter. In both cases back radiation certainly exists, but it can be difficult to measure. In neither case does the back radiation alone cause the source to reach a higher temperature.
In the specific case of an optical integrating sphere the interior surface of the sphere (highly reflective) becomes a virtual light source. This concept of a virtual source is somewhat specific to the optical engineering community. It helps with understanding (and predicting) the paths that photons will follow through a system. However (and this is a very big however) it DOES NOT predict the energy present at any point in the system.
In the case of an optical integrating sphere with an incandescent filament (aka a light bulb) inside this back radiation merely delays the elapsed travel time of the photons flowing through the system. This is a result of the photons bouncing back and forth inside the sphere until they find an exit port.
This is known as the transient response of an optical integrating sphere.
This is a somewhat obscure but still well understood concept. If you inject an input pulse of light (off, then quickly on, then quickly off again) this transient response function will create a stretched pulse of output light. Specifically this square input pulse is no longer a square output pulse since some photons will quickly find an exit port and others will bounce near and far before exiting the sphere.
The gaseous atmosphere of the Earth is quite like an optical integrating sphere in this regard. The photons arriving from the Sun and being converted to emitted IR radiation (still a form of light or electromagnetic radiation and following all of the same rules/laws) simply bounce back and forth between the atmosphere and the surface. All this bouncing merely delays the flow of energy through the system as the energy alternates between light energy and thermal energy.
Given the dimensions of the atmosphere (about 5 miles high) and the velocity of light (still considered quite speedy) this alleged GHE merely delays the flow of energy (arriving as sunlight) through the system by a few tens of milliseconds. The specific delay for any given photon is of course described by a statistical distribution.
Since the period of the arriving light is about 24 hours this delay of a few tens of milliseconds has no effect on the average temperature at the surface of the Earth.
Another example of back radiation and its practical uses is the multi layer optical interference coating. This is the highly engineered coating on most modern optical lenses. It appears slightly purple when observed off-axis. The purpose of this coating is to reduce reflections from the surface of a lens.
These coatings have greatly improved the quality of photographs and videos by increasing contrast and reducing ghost images (images that are created by the individual surfaces inside a modern optical lens).
These coatings function by delaying following photons by a time equivalent to a fraction of the wavelength of the arriving light. By creating exactly the correct delay interval the reflected light is exactly out of phase from the arriving light and destructive optical interference occurs. This moves the optical energy to a location inside the optical lens where it is no longer subject to surface reflections.
Both of these applied radiation physics effects/techniques have been applied for decades and are quite well understood.
The alleged radiative greenhouse effect merely delays the flow of energy through the system and has no effect on the average temperature. It does change the response time of the gases in the climate. Since the gases have the smallest thermal capacity of all the components present (Oceans, land masses, atmosphere) the idea that they are controlling the average temperature is quite ludicrous.
Modeling these radiative effects in the climate is probably impossible. The required spatial distances are sub-micron the the time steps necessary are in the nanosecond range. There would need to be a increase of computing power of about ten orders of magnitude to even begin to attempt this.
There is of course a gravitational greenhouse effect whereby the effects of gravity acting on the gases in the atmosphere of the Earth predict quite well (see the US standard atmosphere model last updated in 1976) the temperature of the atmosphere of the Earth with no use of radiative effects at all.
It is quite sad that all this effort has been wasted on modeling the unmodelable.
Cheers, KevinK
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This is why an increase in co2 levels has no effect whatsoever on temperatures. The so called trapping of heat is in response to the gravito-thermal greenhouse effect of Maxwell and others. This determines what the temperature will be and the greenhouse gases only raise the temperature set at that level and no more and no less.
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