The “Greenhouse Effect” that your car and, well, a greenhouse experience.
Here’s what I think, so let me know how close I am:
Some of the light spectrum has lost some energy slamming thru the glass, so that now their wavelengths are longer, taking them from the low end of the visible part of the spectrum into the infra-red part.
You’re pretty close. It’s not slamming through the glass that does it, but slamming into your car seats. Or the plants in a greenhouse. The light doesn’t necessarily reflect, and some is absorbed. As the seat absorbs more high-energy light, it becomes warmer, and radiates some of the energy away, but in the low IR range. Unfortunately, that doesn’t pass through glass… and gets trapped in your car. Or your greenhouse.
LL
As I understand the Greenhouse Effect, what happens is that energy passes through the glass and is absorbed by objects beneath the glass. The warm objects in turn radiate heat. A portion of this radiated heat is then trapped by the glass and again absorbed by the objects beneath the glass. To use your example of a car, sunlight passes through the car windows and the interior of the car heats up. The objects in the interior radiate heat to cool down, but the radiated heat gets trapped by the car windows and is again absorbed by the objects in the interior; the heat becomes trapped. So the interior of the car heats up.