Kaelondris Veynar

Young 23 year old Chris Martz (who now interns for fossil fuel funded propaganda group CFACT) is attacking a strawman. While accusing others of being "incorrect", he also presented only part of the correct physics while leaving out the key mechanisms. “Trap heat” is just shorthand for reducing Earth’s radiative heat loss. When a CO2 molecule absorbs an infrared photon in the dense lower atmosphere, it usually does not immediately re-emit one. Instead it collides with surrounding N2 and O2 molecules orders of magnitude faster than radiative emission occurs, transferring that energy into the kinetic energy of the air (heat). Molecular collisions also excite CO2 which then emits infrared radiation. This constant radiative–collisional exchange is how absorbed radiation becomes atmospheric warming. He also omits that emitted photons are typically absorbed and re-emitted many times before escaping to space. Increasing CO2 shortens the mean free path of infrared photons and raises the altitude from which Earth effectively radiates to space. Because temperature decreases with altitude in the troposphere, those higher layers are colder and emit less radiation. The planet therefore warms until outgoing infrared radiation once again balances incoming solar energy. So the issue isn’t whether greenhouse gases form a literal “lid”. No climate scientist claims that. The point is that they slow the rate at which the Earth system loses heat to space, which raises the equilibrium surface temperature. Leaving out collisional thermalization and the emission-height mechanism while claiming others “don’t understand the science” gives a very incomplete picture of how the greenhouse effect actually works. See: "Infrared Radiation & Planetary Temperature" -Prof Ray Pierrehumbert geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/pa…