A Quick Summary to Date

As I have mentioned before, Greenhouse Theory is not my main thing. All the data gathered for studying the Greenhouse Effect may hold a lot more information than just the radiant impacts of CO2 and the rest of the little photon grabbers. So here is a quick summary for the guys really concerned with the Greenhouse Effect:

CO2 has a radiant impact at a given temperature of one half of the area of its absorption spectrum relative to the emission spectrum of the layers below that temperature. So if you integrate the area of the CO2 spectrum and you know the spectrum it is exposed to you can determine the impact. CO2 is basically a space blanket with a lot of holes in it.

If energy is to be conserved, the radiant impact of the atmosphere, all molecules, cannot exceed, twice the temperature of the surface or the energy input to the surface, which ever comes first. Since the surface average emission is 390Wm-2 @ 288K and the TOA emission is ~ 238Wm-2, 142Wm-2 is the energy limit of the warming (twice that value as both surface warming and Tropopause cooling balance, See next point). Since not all of that energy is emitted from the surface, only the portion emitted from the surface can impact the surface.

Since surface and atmospheric warming has to be balanced by equal cooling, the Tropopause temperature has to be depressed just as far below the average temperature of the atmosphere as the surface is raised above the average temperature of the atmosphere. One should note that the tropopause temperature is fairly stable. That is because horizontal radiant energy transfer within the Tropopause layer stabilizes the temperature to near the average cooling impact of the atmospheric effect.

Spectral broadening at higher temperatures due to collisional energy transfer is a conductive impact with radiant importance. Radiant impact and conductive impact cannot be considered separately.

Latent energy from the surface shifts the apparent temperature of the surface. Since the conductive impact below the radiant shift layer is not equal to the radiant impact above the latent shift layer, it complicates accurate calculation of the Greenhouse impact at the surface.

Finally, the impact of the Greenhouse Effect varies regionally due to all these conditions plus available surface energy, i.e. albedo and global circulation of internal energy. Have fun trying to figure that out :)