A colleague pointed out this website to me:
http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadGreenhouse.html I'm interested in getting to the bottom of this. I was taught (back in the days when the next Ice Age was being predicted so before any idea of a runaway Greenhouse Effect) that a greenhouse works because light from the Sun at short wavelengths can get through the glass. These are absorbed and heat the contents. The contents are now warm but not as warm as the Sun, so they now emit at longer infra-red wavelengths which can't get through the glass. I had heard rumours that there might be problems with this. The linked webpage talks about the glass stopping convection. That's undeniably true. I'm really interested in the idea that the atmosphere radiates electromagnetic waves like a star. I've never heard that said before but it's utterly logical. For any black body (the name given in Physics to a perfect emitter of electromagnetic waves (remember that matt black painted objects cool faster..) Wien's Law applies: wavelength of peak emission intensity x absolute Temperature = a constant. So the colder the object is, the longer the wavelength, from my original teaching. But the idea that this could heat the Earth's surface more than the Sun is new to me and may be worthy of some calculations... Hopefully more to follow.
