The energy budget has more energy radiating away from the earth than it absorbs from the sun. A great deal more.
If energy that has radiated away from the surface of the earth could be re-radiated back and actually absorbed by the earth, that would constitute the creation of energy as the amount of energy within the system would increase. Picture an electric heater in the center of your room. That heater is radiating 100 watts per square meter. You could put any number of reflectors around that heater and it would never radiate a single watt more than you are paying the electric company for. Climate science is making the claim that if you put reflectors around that heater, that somehow, you will be able to get that heater to radiate more than 200 watts while only paying the electric company for enough electricity to radiate 100 watts. In other words, more out than is coming in....perpetual motion.
I am looking at the graphic. 161 watts per square meter absorbed by the surface from the sun. 493 watts per square meter radiated out from the same surface that just absorbed 161 watts per square meter. The energy budget indicates that more than twice as much energy is absorbed by the surface of the earth in the form of backradiation from the atmosphere than is absorbed from the sun. What do you get from the graphic?
They claim that that additional energy required to allow the earth to radiate 493 watts per square meter is being backradiated to the surface of the earth from the atmosphere.
I think that the energy budget is a sham. It is the basis for the largest hoax ever perpetrated in the history of mankind. As I have said before, that energy budget is based on an expression of incoming energy from the sun in terms of P/4. It treats the earth as if it were a black body. You can express energy to and from a black body in terms of P/4 because if you are looking at a black body, it looks basically the same from any direction. A star is a black body. If mathematically, you make a flat surface out of it, you are still expressing reality (or very close to it) in terms of radiating energy because from top to bottom and all the way around, the star looks pretty much the same and the radiation from any point is pretty much the same with some slight variation.
The earth is not a black body. It is not a self illuminated 3D object that looks the same from any direction. The earth is an illuminted 3D body that is being radiated across 180 degrees of its surface at any given time and that radiation across that 180 degrees is not uniform as more radiation is being absorbed near the equator and progressively less is being absorbed as you near the poles.
The greenhouse effect is a fabrication required to explain the temperature of the earth because it is being modeled as a flat disk that is being irradiated by the sun at a rate of 1/4 of the actual amount of energy coming in from the sun 24 hours a day with no daytime or night time cycle. If you model the earth as it actually is, ie an illuminted 3D body being irradiated across 180 degrees of its surface and express the energy coming in from the sun in actual watts per square meter rather than P/4, a greenhouse effect is not necessary to explain the temperature of the earth.
Like the issue of whether or not there is warming, you are tyring to stuff science into a small box when it simply doesn't fit.
To number one, the answer is maybe.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html
To number two, yes.
To number three, most of the time see the link associated with number one.
To number four, infrared is radiation. That is, it is energy. That energy may be expressed as heat when it strikes a solid object, but ifrared does not produce heat.
T0 number five, yes. It can be explained in terms of adiabatic lapse rate.
