Imagine a large room with perfectly insulating walls. The room contains chairs, tables, books, sheets of paper, pitchers and glasses of water, some flowering plants, and so forth. Now comes the question:
“If we add some heat (say 1 MJ) to the room, how much does the temperature rise?”
“If we add a certain heat flux (say 1 W/m2) all over the surface of the earth, how much would the temperature rise? So many assumptions are involved that the calculated temperature rise can be pretty much anything. Start programming your supercomputer!
Now turn that unanswerable question around and ask an answerable question:
“If the temperature of the surface rises by (say) 1ºC, how much more IR does it emit?”
