"The greenhouse effect makes the earth inhabitable.
Developing laboratory experiments starting in 1859, John Tyndall recognized that greenhouse gasses warm the atmosphere by slowing heat loss from the surface to space.
This slowing of infrared energy to space makes the earth inhabitable, with the principal greenhouse gas being water vapor.
Tyndall noted that the influence of some greenhouse gases is not proportional to their concentrations. [EN 3]
Decades of laboratory experiments show that carbon dioxide is an effective greenhouse gas only at extremely low concentrations.
Its effectiveness is exhausted at less than one-half of the concentration it was when humans began using fossil fuels.
Humans increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide is like adding a thin sheet on top of a thick quilt, it does little or nothing.
In the 1970s, with parts of the world undergoing economic development and carbon dioxide concentrations increasing, surface temperatures indicated the earth shifted from cooling to warming.
The National Research Council formed an influential panel which asserted that even though laboratory experiments demonstrate that carbon dioxide has a modest effect on temperature, the slight warming caused by carbon dioxide
– less than 3 percent of the total atmospheric warming effect –
would be greatly amplified by increases in water vapor.
This was a guess, without physical evidence.
The guess managed to turn a modest 2-degree Fahrenheit (°F) maximum increase due to a doubling of carbon dioxide alone into a speculative 6 °F total increase. [EN 4]
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many US scientific bodies have incorporated the guess into unstated assumptions.
However, starting in 1979, the US developed a significant body of observations of the atmosphere using satellites.
Forty years of measured atmospheric temperature trends, the only comprehensive global temperature dataset existing, confirm a century of laboratory experiments.
The effect of increasing carbon dioxide is small, much less than natural variation.
At the surface, it is difficult to separate the increase in the greenhouse effect from natural variation.
Further, the speculated amplification from increased water vapor cannot be found.
For over 40 years the US has compiled data on the greenhouse effect itself, supporting the atmospheric temperature trends – increasing carbon dioxide will produce a modest warming.
The current warming of the atmosphere is 0.25 °F per decade since January 1979, or about 1 °F since January 1979, or about 2.5 °F per century.
It is in the middle of the lowest set of estimates of warming currently developed by the IPCC, which assumes little increase in carbon dioxide.
This includesall greenhouse gases and natural variation.
It is well within the range of natural historic warming. [EN 5]
Based on observations by NOAA at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, each year the maximum atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration occurs in May.
Using May measurements grew from 339 parts per million in volume (ppm) in 1979 to 419 ppm in 2021.
This is an increase of 80 ppm or 24%.
Yet the increase in atmospheric temperatures from all sources was only 1°F.
The most appropriate physical evidence does not support the fear that increasing carbon dioxide is causing dangerous warming. [EN 6]
For increasing carbon dioxide to cause surface warming, the atmosphere must warm at a greater rate than the surface, but the opposite is happening.
The probable causes of surface warming are urbanization, changes in ocean circulations, and solar variations that we do not fully understand, not greenhouse gases.
In general, those using surface data to claim dangerous warming ignore such changes.
They use models which have never been validated (using physical evidence from the atmosphere) to speculate 30 to 80 years into the future."