I just wrote my best troll hammer yet. I apologize for reposting, but I worked hard on it.

In the interests of courtesy, I will try to explain the basic science of how GHGs work. There is indeed a mountain of evidence for the fact that they really do absorb light and become warm.

Since you wish to base your arguments on facts and evidence, please let me give you them, and honestly, what I will talk about are facts that were well known long before there was any discussion of climate. Please, in the interests of courtesy take the time to read and understand the argument I am making. It will take some time to fully type out.

First off there is the very important fact that energy is conserved. Now, light carries energy. If something were to absorb light, it must, of necessity also gain in energy. Otherwise, energy would disappear and that would violate conservation of energy.

Heat is a form of energy. It turns out that if one were to look on a molecular and/or atomic level, the energy of heat is really mechanical energy or molecular and atomic vibrations and motions.

The picture is that if you shine light on something, and it absorbs that light, some of the energy of the light gets translated into atomic and molecular vibrations. Part of the energy of the light went into heat. This is something that you should be familiar with from your everyday experience. If you were to sit in bright sunshine, you get warmer then if you sit in the shade. Hopefully, you do not dispute this fact.

Now there is a deeper level to this phenomena. Light comes in many different frequencies. The colors of light all correspond to different frequencies. UV is higher frequency and hence shorter wavelength than say green light, IR or radio waves. Individual photons of light also have higher or lower energies that they carry based on the Einstien relation E=hv (the v here is frequency). This is was discovered in the photo-electric effect.

So UV photons also have higher energies than say IR or radio waves.

Are you with me so far?

This is all very well established physics. It is all stuff that was well known well before the climate debate. The wave and frequency view of light was completely formulated by Maxwell in the 1870’s and Einstein published his work on the photo electric effect in 1905.

Now how do you make light of different frequencies at an atomic or molecular level, and how do you you absorb light on that level?

It was well known before the discovery of quantum mechanics, in the late 1800’s that different atoms and molecules emitted and absorbed different frequencies of light when they were heated up. This could be seen by spectral analysis using a device called a diffraction grating.

Why would say sodium give off two very strong colors of yellow, but not green or red? Why would CO2 absorb IR really well, but not say radio waves?

The answer came from Quantum Mechanics. It turns out that once you set up an atomic nucleus with a given number of protons, that there are only certain orbits that the electrons of the atom can go into. Each of these orbits has an energy associated with it. Once you set up a molecule made of certain atoms, the electrons that form the bonds can only go into certain orbits. These too have certain energies associated with them.

When electrons go into different orbits or orbital configurations, in an atom, they change energy. Once again, energy is conserved. So if light is of a frequency that matches and orbital shift, it will be absorbed. If the electrons shift down, light of a frequency that exactly matches the energy shift is emitted. This was well established by the 1920’s.

to be continued…