indeed impossibly greater.

By contrast CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for centuries

Chamberlin quickly added that "This threat of disaster is not, however, a scientific argument..."

As explained above, the energy received at the Earth's surface must eventually work its way back up to the higher layers where radiation does slip out easily (in the language of physics, this is the side "wings" of the absorption spectrum, where the gas only partially blocks radiation). . Adding some greenhouse gas to those high, thin layers must warm the planet no matter what happens lower down.

You forgotten already?

Short wave, OK.

Not in the frequencies where AGW happens—near infrared from the sun, far infrared from the surface. Do try to read a science book some time.

An important example of work on the topic was an idea developed by the meteorologist Alfred Wegener in the 1920s. It happened that Wegener loved geology as much as meteorology (he was also dedicated to studies in Greenland, where he disappeared on an expedition in his fiftieth year). In collaboration with another meteorologist, Wladimir Köppen, Wegener worked through the geological evidence of radical climate change. Traces of ancient ice caps were found in rock beds near the equator, and fossils of tropical plants in rocks near the poles. Wegener hoped to resolve the puzzle with his controversial claim that continents drifted about from tropics to Arctic and back. Along the way the two meteorologists worked out a climate change theory.      

They started off from Arrhenius's idea that the key variable, albedo, depended on whether snow melted or persisted through the summer. The great sheets of ice that reflected away sunlight could persist only if they rested on land, not ocean. So the authors figured that the recent epoch of ice ages had begun when the North Pole wandered over Greenland, and ice ages had ceased once it moved on into the Arctic Ocean.
     
Wegener and Köppen went into further detail using a theory that had been hanging around since the 19th century. Croll had suggested that ice ages could be linked with regular cycles in the Earth's orbit, the kind of thing astronomers computed. Over many centuries these shifts caused minor variations in the amount of sunlight that reached a given latitude on the Earth. The variations gave rise to ice ages, Croll argued, whenever enfeebled sunlight allowed excess snow accumulation. In the 1920s a Serbian engineer, Milutin Milankovitch began to develop these astronomical calculations and plugged them into equations that simulated the global climate. His energy budget model was like Arrhenius's, but paid closer attention to how much sunlight was received at each latitude in each season, and what that would mean for ice and snow. Milankovitch found that it was summers with weaker sunlight, in other words colder summers, that counted for keeping the reflective snow in place — not cold winters, as Croll had supposed. Wegener and Köppen took up these ideas, insisting that they were "nearly self-evident, and yet contested by some authors!"(30)