This image comes from the Wikipedia article on the greenhouse effect.

The red bit is the sunlight coming down. The drawn line is roughly what’s at the top of the atmosphere (there is some loss because of Fraunhofer lines, but basically it’s a perfect blackbody) and the coloured in red bit is what reaches the Earth’s surface. The missing wavelengths are absorbed – and you can see below why:

• UV and blue are absorbed by ozone in the upper atmosphere and “Rayleigh Scattering” (the thing that makes the sky look blue in the daytime and red at sunset).
• The near infrared (sunlight with wavelengths too long for us to see) is absorbed mostly by water vapour (and a few wavelengths by carbon dioxide) (more to come)

The blue and purple lines are what the Earth would emit at different Earth temperatures (the one most to the left is for a blackbody at 310 K – or about 35 ºC – the one furthest right for temperatures around 210 K – or about -63 ºC). The solid blue bit is the only bit that gets through the atmosphere. All other wavelengths are absorbed by water molecules (“water vapor” plot) or by carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.

The diagram is drawn for a normalised blackbody curve – so you can see the thermal infrared one and the solar one on the same picture. In reality the solar one would be much “higher” as well – and the blue ones would not only shift left with higher temperatures, but also get taller.

Because so much of the output spectrum is absorbed, the Earth will heat up until it’s output is equal to its input: it needs to be at a hotter temperature for the energy in the coloured in blue bit to be equal to the area under the whole curve at a lower temperature.

This is known as the ‘greenhouse effect’ – but that’s actually a poor name. Yes, there is some real “greenhouse effect” in a greenhouse: the sunlight gets through the glass, but the thermal radiative energy of the surfaces in the greenhouse, emitting thermal infrared radiation, can’t get back out again … but actually the main reason real greenhouses warm up is that hot air can’t escape… ah well!