Radiative Heat Transfer as Resonance Phenomenon

The analysis of blackbody radiation exposed on Computational Blackbody Radiation suggests that radiative heat transfer is a phenomenon of near-resonance between bodies communicating through electromagnetic waves combined with a phenomenon of high-frequency cut-off, which effectively leads to one-way heat transfer from warm o cold.

Vieving radiative heat transfer this way removes the non-physical aspects which appear when viewing radiative heat transfer as a two-way exchange of photon particles carrying heat energy back and forth from warm to cold and from cold to warm. The latter view is common in e.g. climate science with in particular downwelling long wave radiation DLR from a cold atmosphere supposedly warming the Earth surface. The non-physical aspects concern the idea of infrared photons and violation of the 2nd law in heat transfer from cold to warm.

The model analyzed on Computational Blackbody Radiation consists of a system of bodies with each body consisting of a set of oscillators subject to small radiative damping, which communicate by sharing a common force carried as an electromagnetic wave. In equilibrium the bodies share a common temperature and there is no heat transfer between the bodies.

Each body is like a radio receiver/sender communicating with the other bodies through resonance transmitted by a  force carried by electromagnetic waves, thus interacting over distance by resonance.

If one body is heated (e.g. internally), then its oscillator amplitude increases and so the corresponding balancing force and the residual force is transmitted to the other bodies which in resonance restore force balance reaching a common temperature. The result is that the heated body transfers heat energy to the surrounding colder bodies, by resonance over distance.

With this view, the functioning of an infrared thermometer can be understood as a set of oscillators which by resonance assumes the same temperature as a target at distance.

Similarly a selective infrared thermometer can be conceptualized as an oscillator with a specific resonance frequency with capability of at distance measuring at the temperature of a body with the specific resonance. It will operate like a sensitive radio sensitive receiver which can tune in on a weak sender at a specific frequency.

The Interferometric Reflectance Imaging Sensor IRIS carried by the Nimbus 4 satellite can be seen as such a selective infrared thermometer capable of measuring the temperature of the atmospheric trace gas CO2 through its main resonance at wave number 667, which produced the following spectrum supposedly demonstrating the warming effect of CO2 as the ditch around 667:

But as discussed in previous posts on emissivity, it is not all clear that the above spectrum constructed from measuring the temperature of the trace gas CO2 describes the emission spectrum of the Earth + atmosphere in the range of resonance of CO2. Most likely, it does not.

PS Here is a transmittance spectrum of CO2 from Scienceofdoom computed with spectralcalc illustrating the sparseness of the absorption away from 667. It does not seem plausible that the transmittance of a O2 - N2 atmosphere with a trace of CO2 is close to zero in the whole interval 600 - 800.

Here is a close-up of computed transmittance through 1 m atmosphere with typical CO2 concentration at 0.1 bar showing the sparseness of absorption: