All of the heat supplied to a house that is kept the same internal temperature is continually lost to the environment. 400W in and 400W out.
If you put more insulation in the house then the temperature inside rises for the same loss of energy to the environment,
but you can reduce the amount of heating supplied so the temperature is lower and the amount lost to the environment is lower.
Thats certainly the truth with a home heated with say a radiant system that was running 120 degree water through pipes in a slab. But the house would never heat to more than 120 degrees no matter how well you insulate it or how much 120 degree water you run through the pipes.
Your mistake is misidentifying the maximum potential of a system.
The maximum potential for radiant heat of a planet is the Stefan Boltzmann equations. Thats because of the diffusion of radiant energy the further you are from the source.
None of the above prevents a room from warming when you insulate it but there is a maximum value, unlike your molecular screen model which has no limits where you can infinitely warm something by infinitely adding insulation layers.
If you are going to claim those 120degree water pipes can warm anything above 120 degrees I would like to see evidence of that fact.
I think there is a far more rational explanation for all this.
1) Two opposed surfaces radiate at each other.
2) The surfaces are very close with a vacuum in the intervening space.
3) Instantaneously both surfaces take on the radiating temperature of the warmer surface. This is accomplished via simple mathematics in that warming rate of a system is proportional to its heat capacity. Since a surface has zero heat capacity it will instantaneously equalize with the warmer surface. (note: if we are talking about stars 13 billion light years away, its not going to be instantaneous and the interface is going to be diffused also so those stars slightly affect us but we do not affect them, in any material way)
4) One should note that practically speaking we are not really talking temperature yet. This surface emission is theoretically in effect an interface, not an object with temperature and accumulated heat that can be sensibly measured.
5) The cooler object begins drawing off energy from this surface interface. What this means is heat loss is not controlled by the radiation interface except as a top end limit. The warmer object cannot cool faster than the interface speed because of Stefan's law.
(thanks Magellan)
6) The rate the cooler object draws off energy from this surface interface by conduction determines its sensible temperature.
7) If you place a thermometer on the surface it will give unreliable results because it will be affected by radiation from the warmer surface and it will be affected by conduction to some extent by the cooler object.
8) If you place a thermometer embedded just below the surface it should record the correct temperature of the cooler object but it won't tell you about the radiation interface.
9) If you read the surface temperature of the object with a IR meter, the IR meter will read the energy of the interface less the losses to that interface via conduction, giving you information similar to the embedded thermometer assuming the device is sophisticated enough to be properly adjusted for exact readings and one possesses the knowledge of how to do that. The IR meter is not influenced by the interface because it has no measurable heat content for the IR meter to capture.
10) Likewise the rate of heat loss from the warm object, despite the interface energy equilibrium, is actually controlled by the rate that an object conducts heat.
11) The Engineering Toolbox curve is only valid if the system can maintain its temperature over time. If the object changes temperature and as a result slows its conductivity the cooler object will warm. If the warmer object warms as a result will be determined by whether the warmer object has a forcing that is capable of warming it further. Climate science turns the amount absorbed by CO2 around and calls that the forcing, then backs down on it when challenged and calls it instead a slowing of cooling, which is not a forcing and only is a forcing if the warmer object has a warming source it has not equalized with already. (for earth thats the blackbody temperature determined by solar irradiance that is completely utilized). Thus the only practical way of warming the surface is via sequestering heat it would have otherwise lost to space. But all passive solar engines are limited to how much warming they achieve during the daytime and maintain it for use in the evening and night essentially recycling the heat.
Now if cooling is reduced there is also the possibility of transferring more heat from day to night via the action of greenhouse gases. But I doubt thats the case. I tend to think that geometrics suggests that semi transparent gases like water vapor and CO2 block as much incoming as they do outgoing. Thats because sunlight is half IR and the atmosphere on average is exposed to twice the sunlight the surface is.
As people become more aware of the entire system I believe they will see the merits of the passive solar machine model. And I can acknowledge to uncertainty as to the role of greenhouse gases in that model.
Why I am uncertain is as you increase the emissivity of the atmosphere (adding certain greenhouse gases with higher emissivity than the atmosphere currently has) you lose insulation value but you gain ability to transfer heat to and from the surface.
Both factors are important to the passive solar model and I can't say if one will dominate over the other. To learn the answer to that we have to in addition to measuring climate temperature above the surface start actually measuring the average real surface temperature, which burns my feet walking on asphalt on a hot day and freezes water to my windshield on cold relatively clear nights when the climate temperature is well above freezing.
You also need to get over running around with your IR meter in an atmosphere that is accelerating heat loss from objects and drawing conclusions about purely radiative systems.
I am convinced that the above system is in compliance with the 2 laws discussed, Stefan's law and 2nd law of thermodynamics and it reserves all temperature gradients to either the inside of objects or conductive interfaces. Radiant systems cannot create temperature gradients outside of objects (e.g. in a vacuum) quite simply because there is no place there to store heat.
And you need to get off the idea of straight line temperature gradients. The only thing straight line in a temperature gradient is the slope of wattage transported. When thats converted to temperature it creates a 4th power curve.
You are using a light as your heat source in recent comments. if the light is no longer directly able to see 4k but instead sees 298K it loses heat less quickly and has to get hotter
Has to get hotter? From what? Are you proposing it magically gets hotter without a forcing? Just because somebody chooses to extrapolate Stefan Boltzmann to purely an interface law, ignoring the role of conduction does not mean its right. The real temperature of cooler objects establishes the net radiation rate. Interfaces maintain zero heat content and cannot warm anything including an IR meter and energy flows through the interfaces. Common window glass 7.5 inches thick put in the upper troposphere at -63C will conduct more than 400watts which is the maximum a surface of 17C can lose to space and its blocking IR! If it blocked all IR the glass would be more conductive than a planet with no atmosphere. If you had a IR transparent glass of the same conductivity as 7.5 inches of window glass, it could transmit more than 800watts, but it won't because there is no more than 400 watts to transmit in the first place.
>>Your claim is you can add conductive material around the glass and it will not change the result? That makes no sense.
Glass is itself a conductive material. If you add more glass you increase the temperature gradient required to conduct the same amount of heat to space. All that changes with the thickness of glass is the
size of the temperature gradient.
If you place glass next to a radiant heater the glass will be hotter on the fire side. Even a super conductor will be hotter by some infintessimal amount on the fire side.
Infintessimal amount? Well lets see the calculation.
How can you believe that if you have 44" of window glass that it will not be hotter on the fire side than the side that is exposed to -50C?
Your conceptualisation is wrong. All materials are conductors and all materials are insulators. Some are good conductors and some are bad insulators. Glass is a bad insulator, but if you add more glass you increase the insulation available. Even the thinnest glass provides some insulation value. Not much but some.
Your error is in not recognizing that the concept of insulation is relative. Something is a conductor if it transfers more heat than the reference. Something is an insulator is if it transfers less heat than the reference.
If the reference is Stefan's law of emissions at the potential blackbody temperature of the earth then all materials will be either effectively invisible due to adequate conduction ability or be insulators and the difference will be determined by the thickness which they are which will vary by every material. If you start mixing materials like sheets of goods in an atmosphere the calculations just get a little more complicated.