Aidan says
"I'd expect every engineer to know that an increase in the temperature of the coolant can warm the surface, as can a decrease in the flow rate of the coolant."
Aidan would not warmer coolant radiate more heat out to space? What good would a coolant be if it did not warm?
Also how can increasing the quantity of the coolant be compared to decreasing the flow rate? If CO2 can radiate up and out then more of it can radiate more out. I can see that more coolant would even out the temperatures and reduce extremes but the global effect would be a reduction due to more heat leaving from the coolant.

Oh dear we still have men arrogant enough to think they can regulate the climate. Obvously the same dumbed down crowd who deny laws require a Lawmaker, complex design requires a Designer and morality requires a Moral Being. Oh well if they can't accept these simple facts they will continue with the earth worshippers religion based largely on fraud.

The idea that CO2 can act as a coolant was used here by NASA as they struggled to cope with how powerful the effect of the solar cycle was on the thermosphere.
They say
"When carbon dioxide gets into the thermosphere, it acts as a coolant, shedding heat via infrared radiation. It is widely-known that CO2 levels have been increasing in Earth's atmosphere. Extra CO2 in the thermosphere could have magnified the cooling action of solar minimum."
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/15jul_thermosphere/

Why are we reading articles like this? what is the four trillion dollar per fossil fuel industry so concerned about?

How about thorium? Created in solar nova expansions. Abundant, cheap and easily recovered! Something roughly the size of a plump cheery, enough to power your home and transport options for a hundred years and the ball of thorium large enough to do so would cost just one hundred dollars to refine?

[Child's play any kid with high school science could manage!] That's just a dollar a year to power your home and transport for a hundred years!

And there's enough of this easily recovered material in the ground to power the entire world for a thousand years!?

Molten salt reactors, working in normal atmospheric pressure, can be massed produced and sent everywhere in stock standard shipping containers! And the good news doesn't end there, given enough cheap, clean, inherently safe energy, we can end want and wars!

Moreover, these things can burn more than thorium producing comparatively tiny amounts of far less toxic waste, but can do double duty and burn existing nuclear waste to reduce the half life to just three hundred years!

The seriously threatened fossil fuel industry relies on the word nuclear power summoning up imagines of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Chernobyl Fukushima etc! To get the usual suspects and their ideological dogma back on the campaign trail doing their PR work for them!

We should have a nuclear industry and import and reburn nuclear waste to reduce the half life of this waste from current thousands of years, right down to around three hundred, and have the rest of the worldpay us billions for doing so! All while we power up our economy, virtually for free!?

Yes, self evidently some of our pollies are patently in the pockets of the foreign fossil fuel industry?

Otherwise what I'm advocating would be our current reality!? As opposed to the usual obtuse obfuscation by obdurate organisms!?

Get on U tube and get fully informed, if only to understand what's really rattling the chain of the fossil fuel advocates?
Alan B.

1. On the mechanism of radiation emitted from the ground, meeting a place in the atmosphere where half goes to space and half downwells (simply put). That half that goes down repeats the cycle and so there is a series whereby ½, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc of the original is lost to space.
If you sum this series it comes back to unity, meaning that by this simple maths the said atmospheric layer might as well not be there. Of course, effects like advection complicate the maths and might mean that they have to be investigated separately to this simple series sum.

2. Re 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, it is not needed to invoke this because it is a given that the air cools the earth. It is a given that overall, heat moves from the earth to the air, because of the non-accumulation of the continuous generation of earth heat meeting the air - the air which has a mechanism such as radiation to space to cool itself and the solid/liquid earth. Note however, that the details of the earth are visible by eye to astronauts outside the atmosphere, so a significant amount of outgoing radiation is in the visible light region. Not all is in the infra red. So the earth can also radiate directly to space, whether there are GHG present or not.
Geoff Sherrington, scientist

On heat transfer, there are texts full of classic heat transfer equations. Some of the work on borehole temperature maths gives these in a similar setting to the one you mention, heat being lost from earth (its radioactive and remnant components, tidal heating if significant), interfacing with the land/air boundary. The full atmosphere has a temperature gradient that is quite complex and influenced by many factors like ozone etc. At the interface, there is a simple concept of a sharply decreasing earth temperature over the last several hundred metres to the surface, exponential if you like, abutting a cooling sink (the air). The amount the sink cools the earth depends on factors like its temperature at a given time. If the air temperature remains higher/lower than normal for a significant period (significant as in being able to measure it confidently), the earth’s near surface cooling curve simply moves the curve’s starting point deeper or shallower into the earth and its finishing point, at the exit temperature to the air, higher/lower to follow the air temp movement. There is no question that the air cools the earth at this interface, because if it did not there would be a steady heat accumulation that is not observed. If you like, the near-surface earth acts as a buffer to hold variations in the cooling ability of the air from time to time.