I'd really like to see what the bigger brains can make of it.

I think you did fine. I will take issue with:

The air below presses against the earth. As I've said before, that one is
so obvious (that we stop looking?).

The air does press on the earth, and this is "where the momentum goes",
which is a big question in one of the poster's minds. No earth, nothing
to press against, and the momentum just keeps on going down. It is
(thus) not true that there is no local momentum transfer. That is one
of the points I was making. There is of course no global momentum
transfer once all parts of the closed system are taken into account.

Jose
--
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