The quote below is what the public believes about carbon dioxide. It was at the top of hundreds or thousands of state and local web sites on greenhouse gases for many years. It's a mockery of science. No real scientists would be caught dead making such statements.

Incompetents in science assumed nothing heats the atmosphere but greenhouse gases. They missed the fact that most heat enters the atmosphere by wind blowing over the surface of the Earth and picking up heat through conduction and convection plus evaporation from the oceans. That's getting too much wrong to be real science. They aren't getting anything else right about carbon dioxide when they get such a simple fact of science wrong.

Here is a quote that they used for many years at the top of most web sites on global warming. Some of it has been removed recently.

The "greenhouse effect" refers to the natural phenomenon that keeps the Earth in a temperature range that allows life to flourish. The sun's enormous energy warms the Earth's surface and its atmosphere. As this energy radiates back toward space as heat, a portion is absorbed by a delicate balance of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere —among them carbon dioxide and methane—which creates an insulating layer. With the temperature control of the greenhouse effect, the Earth has an average surface temperature of 59°F (15°C). Without it, the average surface temperature would be 0°F (-18°C),---

Scientists have concluded that human activities are contributing to global warming by adding large amounts of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere.---we release carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the air.

They are saying the atmosphere was heated 33°C by greenhouse gases, because the surface would be -18°C without an atmosphere, while it is +15°C with an atmosphere. The -18°C is derived from the Stefan-Boltzmann constant.

They are also saying there is no other method of heating the atmosphere than carbon dioxide plus other so-called greenhouse gases—totally eliminating conduction, convection and evaporation as methods of heating the atmosphere.

When they assume the atmosphere was heated 33°C by greenhouse gases, they aren't going to let opponents tell them humans are not heating the planet with carbon dioxide.

Idiot Numbers: If humans doubled the carbon dioxide, the 33°C should have doubled to an additional 33°C. But it was supposedly only an increase of 1°C. At the beginning of the "industrial revolution," about 170 years ago, there was 180 parts per million, or 280 ppm (the fakes can't agree) carbon dioxide in the air. There is now 400 plus ppm CO2 in the air, which means approximately doubled. So the 33°C should have approximately doubled based on the logic of the quoted statement.

The incompetents who promote greenhouse gases are a disgrace and should never have been called scientists. Yet they convinced the journalists who took over the subject, prevented any criticism of it and got real scientists shoved out of science.

What this quote shows is how incompetents in science use word salad in place of real science. They replaced the process of radiation absorption with the word trapping, as if absorbing were trapping. That's using word salad to rationalize assumptions.

Then they used the words insulating layer for the addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, as if in some vague manner carbon dioxide turned the atmosphere into an insulating material. If air insulates, the nitrogen and oxygen would be the influence, not the miniscule carbon dioxide.

But they are not describing an insulating process; they are trying to convince themselves that heat gets trapped in some way, as if insulating traps heat. The atmosphere is actually what engineers call a "heat sink," which means the atmosphere picks up heat from the surface of the Earth through conduction and allows the heat to be dispersed more easily, which a transparent gas does through radiation. A transparent gas will radiate into space much more readily than an opaque solid such as the surface of the Earth.

That's how incompetents get through science without knowing a thing about science—they memorize words with no clue what those words mean. They reconstruct science out of word salad.

It's strange that the fixers assume criticism must be exterminated from their version of science. Shouldn't everyone know that only corruption requires criticism to be exterminated from a subject? Corruption is so fragile, being in conflict with all objective reality, that not the slightest amount of opposition can be allowed.

Here's a similar quote from Wikipedia:

On greenhouse gases, Wikipedia states, "Without greenhouse gases, the average temperature of the Earth's surface would be about -18°C (0°F), rather than the present average of 15°C (59°F)." (/wiki/Greenhouse_gas)

Wikipedia attributes all of the temperature increase caused by the atmosphere (33°C) to greenhouse gases and none to conduction, convection and evaporation.
 
Details Of The Meaning

The quote is written as if it were produced by some dumb assistant for a scientist. No real scientists could be caught dead saying such things. There needs to be some accounting for the scientific absurdities, because that frame of thought is the entirety of the public perception of the problem. That's why that quote was put at the top of hundreds or thousands of web sites for the public. Every state and most local governments had a web site on the subject with that quote at the top for many years.

1.) The "greenhouse effect": There is no justification in referring to anything in the atmosphere as a greenhouse effect. The entire effect of a greenhouse is a barrier of glass or plastic that separates the inside from the outside. No such barrier could exist in the atmosphere, and no analogy of it is in the range of possibilities in the atmosphere. Everything mixes and moves in the atmosphere.

So what is the purpose of saying "greenhouse effect?" The purpose is sort of to generate the impression of greenhouses getting hotter than their environment. Sometimes a greenhouse is called a hot house. There is no environment to the atmosphere to be hotter than.

Hotter than what? Hotter than it would otherwise be. That's nothing resembling a greenhouse effect. A welding torch makes metal hotter than it otherwise would be. If the atmosphere were hotter than it should be, it would be more of a welding torch effect than a greenhouse effect. A welding torch has no environment to compare to; the atmosphere has no environment to compare to; a greenhouse has an environment to compare to.

That means the terminology of greenhouse effect is an attempt to move awareness into a fraudulent thought process of what greenhouses do when nothing resembling such an effect is possible in the atmosphere. No real scientist could be caught dead saying such a thing.

2.) ---refers to the natural phenomenon that keeps the Earth in a temperature range that allows life to flourish. The temperature range of the Earth is about minus 50 degrees below zero at the poles and 125 degrees at the equator. Carbon dioxide doesn't do that. Life exists but doesn't flourish at the poles; and deserts have a problem also. Why didn't carbon dioxide fix those problems? A scientific concept needs explaining, because the whole purpose of science is to increase knowledge.
 
3.) As this energy radiates back toward space as heat, a portion is absorbed--- Very little heat radiates from the surface of the Earth, because cold substances do not produce much radiation. The heat radiates into space almost entirely from the atmosphere, because transparent gases emit radiation much more readily than opaque surfaces.

Weather maps show the result. When the infrared radiation is being photographed, the surface of the Earth is not visible (it gets drawn with lines), because the infrared radiation comes from the atmosphere, not the surface of the Earth, and blocks out the surface of the Earth from view.

The Earth's surface is only visible at higher frequencies which reflect from the Earth and pass through the clear atmosphere. The radiation of heat and absorption by carbon dioxide is lower frequency being in the infrared range.

4.) ---delicate balance of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere--- There is no delicate balance of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. Smoke stacks produce large amounts of carbon dioxide. Some shallow seas and tundras produce large amounts of methane. Nothing balances anything in the atmosphere. The early Earth had a reducing atmosphere. Only billions of years later did significant oxygen enter the atmosphere.
 
There was five times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during dinosaur years as now and twenty times as much when the "Cambrian Explosion of Life" occurred 541 million years ago. How is that variation a delicate balance?

5.) ---which creates an insulating layer. There is no possibility of an insulating layer existing in the atmosphere. Insulation means rate of heat transfer is reduced. With conduction, the rate of transfer is determined by molecular structure of the major components, not one part in 2,500.

They implicitly mean the atmosphere itself becomes an insulating layer, but only when there are so-called greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane within it. Assuming the nitrogen and oxygen are not relevant to the temperature of the atmosphere is beyond stupid. If the surface of the Earth would be -18°C without an atmosphere and 15°C with an atmosphere, the same thing would be true without an iota of carbon dioxide and methane. To not know that is too stupid to be representing science for the public.

They are directly saying the atmosphere would be 33°C colder without so-called greenhouse gases within it. The average global atmospheric surface temperature would supposedly be -18°C instead of 15°C without the claimed greenhouse gases. And humans are not supposed to tweak that 33°C by 1.5°C.

The problem here is like someone saying the Green Martians created New York city. Where do you start; and how do you add rationality to nonsense? And this is why know-nothings in journalism and organizations won't allow criticism of the subject: They couldn't possibly be wrong when assuming carbon dioxide heated the planet by 33°C. "The science is settled," just like New York city is rock solid, because the Green Martians created it.