Nev,
You’ve now shifted from misinterpreting TOA emission spectra to misrepresenting a modeling paper on CO2 absorption coefficients.
Let’s make this crystal clear:
Yes, CO2 absorbs in the 15 µm band—nobody disputes that.
But in the real atmosphere, that band is already near-saturated. Around 99.8% of the surface-emitted radiation in that band is absorbed within the first 10 meters.
Absorption is not emission—and our entire discussion has been about emission capabilities in the troposphere, which you continue to avoid.You can post all the science papers you like, but it doesn’t change the physics. You’re avoiding the core issue with diversionary tactics and appeals to authority, pretending citation counts somehow validate your argument. That’s not science, Nev—that’s hand-waving.
So while your paper shows that increasing CO2 raises the absorption coefficient, that’s just a modeling artifact. It doesn’t mean significant new energy is being absorbed near the surface. It just slightly broadens the absorption wings—with rapidly diminishing returns.In other words, the energy is already accounted for, and additional CO2 has very little impact on the surface energy balance in that band.
Now here’s the point you keep dodging:
That absorbed energy in the lower troposphere is not lost to space—it’s redistributed through collisional de-excitation (CDE).
Only at higher altitudes—where collisions are rare—does radiative de-excitation (RDE) start to matter, allowing energy to be emitted as photons that can actually escape to space..The paper you linked deals with optical modeling, not the real-world thermodynamics of a dense, collision-dominated environment.
It doesn’t contradict my point—it quietly reinforces it… if you actually understand the context.
And as for citing Arrhenius (1896) and waving around citation stats like a scoreboard? Come on, mate—that’s Wikipedia activism, not scientific debate.
