Why the greenhouse analogy does not work in climate science
However, the fact is that a
real greenhouse works by stopping convective cooling by trapping air warmed by sunlight inside of itself, whereas in the open that warm air rises away leaving only cooler air behind. And so, in fact, Sabine does not understand how an actual greenhouse works, and she does not mention convection at all. If real greenhouses worked by the radiative method Sabine describes, then they should get much hotter than the temperature at which they are heated by the Sun, but, no greenhouse in the world has ever demonstrated this, and if Sabine but knew it, all real greenhouses therefore provide empirical proof that the backradiation heating method does not exist.
In other words, it is not the incoming 80°C sunlight which warms the greenhouse, but only the re-radiated infrared light which does so. This goes directly to climate science’s position
that sunlight does not heat planet Earth to any significant extent at all, but that it is backradiation from the cold atmosphere which provides twice the heating power of the Sun! The Kiehl & Trenberth energy model shown below, if you run the numbers, claims that the Sun can only heat the Earth to -40°C (168 W/m² Incoming Solar Radiation Absorbed by Surface), and that backradiation does all the rest of the heating with almost twice the power of the Sun (324 W/m² Back Radiation Absorbed by Surface).
... understanding the model versus the analogy makes all the difference in explaining how a real greenhouse works versus greenhouse gases in the atmosphere ... which by the way are trapped inside the greenhouse