Derek - Smelling the coffee.

[Richard111]

Derek, interesting experiment you linked to.

This business of plastic being transparent to IR has me worried. I will do some tests with plastic from bottles.
I have a woodburning stove which gives out lovely heat. I find if I hold a sheet of clear plastic between my hand and the stove all sense of heat is lost.

I am still ploughing through Hammer's paper and trying to fully understand why the tropopause is so cold. I am slowly coming to the conclusion that the "greenhouse effect" is limited to some distance quite close to the heat source and the major volume of the atmosphere is shielded from any and all IR bands absorbed by any and all so called "greenhouse" gases.

The constancy of the atmospheric lapse rate seems to confirm that any heating of the atmosphere occurs close to the surface and dwindles away rapidly with altitude. The one "greenhouse gas", water vapour, which can change hour by hour has very lttle effect on local temperatures and any increase is lost quickly when the sun goes down and skies remain clear.