These are not mutually exclusive things - visible light passes through the atmosphere, and after it strikes the earth, it changes to heat aka infrared, and that is the heat that is increasingly trapped by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. What NASA is talking about is the infrared that comes from the sun directly - which is not the same. These are two sides of the same coin, and are not contradictory.
Here's an interesting article on the effects of differential heating of the northern and southern hemispheres:
Rising temperature difference between hemispheres could dramatically shift rainfall patterns in tropics