Yes, it is true. Not. One. Paper.

Guess what though? There’s also not a single paper that proves lead is poisonous. There’s also not a single piece of paper that proves you (the OP) are Christopher Carmody . “Proof” is not a word that you will hear from scientists very often. Don’t get worked up over it. Just because there isn’t “PROOF” doesn’t mean it is wrong.

But what you will find is that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of papers that continue to support the hypothesis that CO2 in our atmosphere is a leading contributor to climate change.

By the way, this is nothing new. We have known for decades that CO2 in the atmosphere causes warming.

No…in the lay sense.

I see some posts below discussing Venus as an initial, clue, but, the fact is that we had already figured out carbon dioxide’s involvement back in the 1800’s.

In a nutshell, studies of what wavelengths of light, are absorbed or transmitted or reflected by certain gases, showed that visible light passes through CO2, but infrared doesn’t.

The more CO2, the less infrared makes it through.

Additional measurements showed that this could heat by letting visible light through, but interfering with the escape of infrared (heat).

Calculations revealed what the effects of various concentrations of CO2 would have on the planet’s temperature, including how much warmer earth was, due to its current CO2 (~ a bit over a century ago)… than it would have been without it.

The effect, back then, was called the hot house effect…as it was analogous to the way visible light passes through the glass, and warms a hot house, but the glass prevents all the heat (infrared) from radiating back out, so the hot house gets much warmer.

Later, in the 1900’s, the term greenhouse was used to reflect modern speech, etc.

Subsequent calculations worked out how much warmer based upon the increasing concentrations, it might get.

During the Nixon administration, for example, the Republican Party issued a formal warning and call to action, to address the increasing temperatures due to the increasing CO2 concentrations.

Isotope studies showed that the ADDED CO2 was from the burning of fossil fuels, so, regulations and recommendations to reduce emissions were directed at fossil fuel use.

The fossil fuel industry then started to run agnotological campaigns to spread misinformation about all of this.

That included US and foreign companies, as well as countries that were heavily dependent upon fossil fuels for cashflow.

As Republicans were the ones who started this effort to reduce emissions, the fossil fuel industry lobbies aggressively courted Republicans…

…and the government votes on emissions controls reflected those investments by the fossil fuel industry.

Russia, being extremely dependent upon fossil fuel cashflow, and, having a lot of propagandists, discovered that the agnotological campaigns could politicize the issues.

This resulted in climate change concerns shifting from an objective of the Republican Party, to an objective of the Democratic Party, with Republicans becoming more and more in denial of the issues, as part of their political identity.

And here we are, with Republicans in denial of a priori knowledge.