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I understand you fine. Are you laboring under the impression that heat flowing from a warm object to a cooler object is something other than radiation moving from one place to another? And are you laboring under the impression that the cooler atmosphere can somehow reflect radiation back to the warmer surface of the earth? How might the atmosphere reflect anything? Most of it is invisible to longwave radiation and a very narrow band is absorbed by the several so called greenhouse gasses but they immediately emit precisely as much energy as they absorb in a wavelength that can not be reabsorbed by another greenhouse gas. The energy is scattered, not reflected so the atmosphere acts in exactly the opposite fashion as a solar oven which reflects energy to a very small focal point. Back to the Stefan - Boltzman law: This equation describes a one way energy flow between the emitter and a cooler background. The cooler background can not move LW energy back to the emitter. Sorry, your understanding is terribly flawed. The math, and physical laws of thermodynamics speak for themselves. You can not move radiation from cool to warm and you can not create energy both of which would have to happen in order for there to be such a thing as backradiation. Tell me, do you also believe in back convection and back conduction and perhaps Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny?
I understand you fine. Are you laboring under the impression that heat flowing from a warm object to a cooler object is something other than radiation moving from one place to another? And are you laboring under the impression that the cooler atmosphere can somehow reflect radiation back to the warmer surface of the earth? How might the atmosphere reflect anything? Most of it is invisible to longwave radiation and a very narrow band is absorbed by the several so called greenhouse gasses but they immediately emit precisely as much energy as they absorb in a wavelength that can not be reabsorbed by another greenhouse gas. The energy is scattered, not reflected so the atmosphere acts in exactly the opposite fashion as a solar oven which reflects energy to a very small focal point.
Back to the Stefan - Boltzman law:
This equation describes a one way energy flow between the emitter and a cooler background. The cooler background can not move LW energy back to the emitter. Sorry, your understanding is terribly flawed. The math, and physical laws of thermodynamics speak for themselves. You can not move radiation from cool to warm and you can not create energy both of which would have to happen in order for there to be such a thing as backradiation. Tell me, do you also believe in back convection and back conduction and perhaps Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny?
