The atmosphere is less a heat engine than a collection of many self-running refrigerators/dehumidifiers operating in different ways to carry heat largely from surface to tropopause locally and the balance from equator to poles. An important, but perhaps underappreciated, effect of dehumidification is to make the atmosphere broadly more amenable to cooling by LWIR.
I thought I d post this because there are many who haven t followed the latest findings, who still think that present day life on the surface of Mars is absolutely impossible because of UV light, ionizing radiation, and perchlorates, and because the atmosphere is in almost perfect chemical equilibrium. That is indeed what most scientists