by Guy K. Mitchell, Jr., American Thinker:

The primary heat transfer mechanism to cool the Earth’s surface is convection.  However, at night, when the temperature of the Earth’s surface approximates the temperature of the air above it, the Earth begins to cool by emitting long wave infrared (LWIR) photons into the lower troposphere (the first 8 km of the Earth’s atmosphere).  The basic premise in the man-made global warming hypothesis is that CO2 molecules in the lower troposphere, emitted by the burning of fossil fuels on Earth, absorb the LWIR photons emitted as the Earth cools.  The CO2 molecules “trap” the heat energy in the photon, which causes the troposphere to warm.  Then the CO2 molecule reradiates an LWIR photon of the same wavelength it absorbed back to the Earth’s surface, which warms the Earth’s surface.  The more CO2 molecules that are emitted into the troposphere by burning fossil fuels, the more heat is trapped and reradiated back to the Earth’s surface, increasing atmospheric and surface warming in a never-ending cycle.