That's also important because if the frequency doesn't change then it can't be absorbed by other GHG's and this means the whole atmosphere isn't actually warming and just the CO2 molecules are the ones warming from this capture and release (Unless other GHG's can absorb the same frequency?)
Yes, the frequencies absorbed by CO2 are distinct from O3 and water vapor although there is some overlap with water vapor. And yes the CO2 capture and release those frequencies themselves, but most times before they can release they bump into a neighboring air molecule and transfer some energy to it. So the heat is distributed. It is distributed fairly rapidly, about 19 square mm/s according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_diffusivity which means the energy from a single higher-enery CO2 molecule can warm trillions upon trillions of other molecules in a second. However, 0.04% of those will be other CO2 molecules which may then have enough energy to emit a photon and radiate the energy up into space or down towards earth.
32 meters what? Thick? Wide? Long? Certainly it can't mean there is a 32 meter thick layer of CO2 around the whole globe?
No the CO2 is spread throughout the atmosphere top to bottom. The 32 meters is the average distance that an IR photon with the right wavelength will travel before being absorbed by a CO2 molecule. The actual distance could be close to zero meters or 64 meters or 1000 meters or never (makes it to space unimpeded) but the average distance is 32 meters. That just gives some perspective on the "blanket" (although I don't like that word).
Are you saying it's a 'small blanket' 32 meters long when all the molecules are added up?
Not a bad analogy. Think about taking a real blanket or even a sheet which is solid enough that you can't see much of any light through it. Now take apart all the fibers, turn them into some very fine dust. Now fluff up that dust layer to make it 32 meters thick. That is the CO2 "blanket". You might say that's not much of a blanket. But it is the same amount of material as you started with and still stops all or most light from getting through. And it works roughly the same way absorbing photons of heat and reemitting half of them back at you keeping you warmer than you would be without it. Also there are 1000's of these 32 meter thick blankets stacked up through the troposphere, blankets on top of blankets.
the question then becomes, do these 4 molecules give it up to ALL the non CO2 molecules, or just to a few?
The answer is all within some very short distance. The better answer is trillions at the very least. If there are 10^22 molecules in a liter, then there are 10^19 per cubic mm. That means 10 million trillion molecules could get heated in one second by the diffusion that I linked above. Might be more or less than that because I don't know how to convert diffusion in area (from the link) to diffusion in volume. But suffice to say trillions of molecules could receive that heat. It spreads relatively evenly which produces entropy. The system tries to maximize entropy by spreading the heat as evenly as possible.
[[But suffice to say trillions of molecules could receive that heat. It spreads relatively evenly which produces entropy]]
Ok that’s my question- as it spreads outwards from the source (the CO2 molecule which converts it to energy/heat)- it is losing heat the further it gets from point of origin-
I’ll have to go through rst of you post in a few days- too much going on right now