Pants-of-dog wrote:In this case, an effect on the spectral distribution of the emissions is an effect on their quantity, to use your words.
No it isn't.
To put it simply, the Earth emits energy at different wavelengths.
That's putting it a little
too simply. The IR wavelengths the earth emits from its surface -- water, land and ice -- are not the same ones it emits from its atmosphere to outer space, which satellites measure. Without GHGs, the IR emissions from the surface would escape directly to outer space without heating the atmosphere, and the earth would be a frozen ball of ice.
With GHGs, the earth's surface is much warmer, and the temperature and spectrum of the final emission are those of GHGs at the emission altitude. That is a crucial difference which you self-evidently do not understand.
The change created by GHGs (or as you put it, the effect on spectral distribution of the emissions) is a reduction in energy emitted.
No it isn't. It's just an increased difference between surface temperature and the temperature of final emission to outer space, a delay between the daytime and nighttime temperature equilibria, a higher equilibrium altitude and commensurately lower temperature of final emission, and a shift in its spectral distribution. The equilibrium energy emitted is exactly the same with and without GHGs: the same amount of energy that is received from the sun.
To put it simply, you have no knowledge or understanding of atmospheric physics or radiative heat transfer in the atmosphere, and you refuse to learn anything from someone who does.
We have direct evidence that CO2 and other GHGs have a measurable effect.
Yes, as described above:
not on the
amount of energy emitted, only on the difference between surface and emission temperature, the delay in reaching diurnal equilibria, and the altitude, characteristic temperature, and spectral distribution of the final IR emission to outer space, as I explained to you so very patiently, above.
And again, this effect is an effect on their quantity, as you put it.
No it is not. You are just wrong. The
quantity of energy emitted is exactly the same with or without GHGs. The only differences are as I described above. The controversy over CO2's effect on climate -- AGW -- concerns only how
additional CO2's effect on the altitude, temperature and spectral distribution of the final emission to outer space propagates back down to affect temperature at the surface. Angstrom's experiment showed it has almost no effect because the IR absorption of standard surface air is already massively oversaturated by water vapor and the pre-industrial level of CO2.