From No Trick Zone

By Kenneth Richard

CO2’s role in climate change is too small to detect in error-ridden attribution measurements.

Downward longwave radiation (DWLWR) at the ocean surface “is among the most important components of the heat flux across the ocean-atmosphere interface, which, in turn, shapes the climate state of both the atmosphere and the ocean” (Peng et al., 2025).

According to canonical anthropogenic global warming (AGW) “science,” in an imaginary-world atmosphere where no clouds exist it takes 10 years, or a 22 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, to enhance DWLWR by just 0.2 W/m² (Feldman et al., 2015). The annual clear-sky forcing change from CO2 is, of course, ten times smaller than this, or 0.02 W/m².

To put these values in perspective, DWLWR from changes in cloud radiative forcing can reach 200 W/m² within a span of hours (Wielicki et al., 2002, Wong and Minnett, 2018). Thus, day-to-day changes in cloud in the real-world, all-sky atmosphere can enhance or decrease DWLWR 1000 times more than CO2 does over the course of a full year.

This negligible or unmentionable CO2 impact may be why, in a new study, scientists do not even consider CO2’s bit role in shaping DWLWR. Clouds, water vapor, air and sea surface temperature, and surface solar radiation are documented contributors (see Table 2). CO2 is not.

In attempts to model the variations and trends in all-sky DWLWR attributed to its contributing factors, scientists find that primarily due to inability to accurately estimate or observe cloud radiative effects, model error (RMSE, root mean square error) in calculating all-sky DWLWR ranges from 15.6-19.1 W/m².

A RMSE of about 17.4 W/m² means a decadal-scale DWLWR CO2 “signal” (0.2 W/m²) is ~87 times smaller than DWLWR measurement error. This precludes detection of CO2’s role in DWLWR, and thus CO2’s role in climate.

The AGW narrative insists CO2 is the “control knob” of global temperature. Anyone who disagrees or even questions this is often labeled a “climate denier.” The narrative consequently requires its adherents to abandon any consideration of uncertainty and error in attribution (“control knob”) detection.