There Is No Macroscopic Greenhouse Effect At All

The Australian Climate Skeptics blog has a post by Dr. Vincent Gray, a onetime IPCC insider and critic, and a long-time hero to climate skeptics. Dr. Gray is a "lukewarmer", believing that there is a global-warming greenhouse effect but that it is "very small". My response to his essay:

"The speculation by some that radiation cannot be absorbed by an object whose temperature is less than that of the radiant emitter..."

---That "less than" must be a mistake, as no one speculates that a cooler object cannot absorb heat from a hotter one. It should read "more than", as in, a hotter object cannot be heated by a cooler one. Dr. Gray (along with the "consensus" alarmists and all the "lukewarmist" believers in the greenhouse effect) is denying even the latter when he states that "backradiation" from CO2 (in the cooler atmosphere) further warms the planetary surface; he is wrong, and merely covering his error by admitting that the warming due to such backradiation "must be very small as it has not been detected, despite the enormous effort that has been applied to try and find it." The definitive evidence against the consensus greenhouse effect is my Venus/Earth temperature-vs-pressure comparison, which simply shows it does not exist, and the CO2 climate sensitivity is (-0.026 +/- 0.12) °C per doubling of CO2--the possible size of the effect is one-fifth of the uncertainty in the calculation and is thus essentially zero. While an individual photon from a cooler object may very rarely be absorbed by a warmer object, that is essentially on the microscopic scale; macroscopically, photons from a cooler object cannot be absorbed by a warmer object. Failing to distinguish between rare events that are possible on the quantum scale, but not in the macroscopic, bulk transfer of heat energy, is the common error of all believers in the greenhouse effect. It really does boil down to the simple proscription against a cooler body further warming a warmer body, as the definitive Venus/Earth evidence (which compares an atmosphere with .04% CO2--Earth--to one with 96.5%--Venus; the difference could hardly be greater, and the result--zero sensitivity to CO2--is definitive) simply demonstrates to anyone with eyes to see (and very few do, as I did that comparison 4 and 1/2 years ago and it is still ignored by both sides). 97% of both sides in the debate are incompetent (and that includes, unfortunately, even Dr. Gray).