There is a concept in the minds of ill-informed persons including some scientists which tells them that so-called greenhouse gases are all there is holding heat on planet earth. They seem to think that nitrogen and oxygen, which make up more than 99% of the atmosphere, have nothing to do with heating the globe.

If all micro components were removed from the atmosphere, there would be little or no change in atmospheric temperature. This is because the heat is held by nitrogen and oxygen.

One of the erroneous assumptions is that heat would be radiated from the surface of the earth into space without heating the atmosphere, if it were not being caught by micro components of the atmosphere. There is almost no heat being radiated from the surface of the earth. Propaganda scientists show "energy budgets" with a large amount of radiation leaving the surface of the earth, such as 41% on the NASA scheme, which I discuss on the page titled "The 41% Fraud".

Heat leaves the earth's surface through conduction, convection and evaporation but very little infrared radiation, because normal temperature matter does not emit much infrared radiation. It is nitrogen and oxygen which pick up the heat through conduction and convection, and eventually through evaporation.

The atmosphere holds heat for about a month, as indicated by the fact that the longest day in the northern hemisphere (June 21) is about a month before the hottest day (July 21). The energy then leaves the atmosphere as infrared radiation emitted by the entire atmosphere, which is mostly nitrogen and oxygen. As the radiation travels into space, it carries energy away from the earth.

Where in this do you see carbon dioxide? It's a joke. Rationalizers are concerned about the fact that carbon dioxide will absorb infrared radiation very strongly. So what. They can't explain how the carbon dioxide heats the atmosphere or why nitrogen and oxygen do not heat the atmosphere.

So propagandists in science tit-for-tat their critics countering every point with fake numbers which show the opposite. They error in trying to stretch the numbers while contradicting basic mechanisms involving principles of physics. Their primary error of assuming absorption of radiation is creating heat defies the fact that the radiation would be absorbed anyway at a longer distance. Changing the distance is not adding heat. It isn't even changing the location of the heat, because radiation is emitted in all directions equally, which means for every distance upward which is shortened, a distance downward is shortened, and the average location is the starting point.

The basic misconception is that nothing would be absorbing the radiation, if "greenhouse gases" were not. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Nitrogen and oxygen are the primary absorbers of the radiation, just as they are the primary emitters of the radiation. Kirchhoff's law says emissivity equals absorptivity, which means everything absorbs and emits black body radiation in the same way. What nitrogen and oxygen emit is what they absorb. At the cold temperatures of the upper atmosphere, emission is very low, but the surface area for gases is almost infinitely greater than for solids, which results in much more emission from the atmosphere than from the surface of the earth.

The distance for complete absorption by nitrogen and oxygen near the earth's surface is probably about 5 kilometers for long-wave infrared and 10 kilometers for short-wave infrared, but I haven't seen exact numbers. This means radiation absorbs to extinction on both sides of the transition between the lower atmosphere (troposphere) and stratosphere. The only way "greenhouse gases" can prevent radiation from escaping into space is to absorb it during the last cycle, which would be about 70 kilometers up in the atmosphere. Nothing that high mixes with the lower atmosphere.

There is no relevance to preventing radiation from escaping into the stratosphere, which starts at 17 kilometers up or less, because radiation does not significantly escape directly into space from the stratosphere but from higher up. The logic that says stopping radiation before it enters the stratosphere is increasing heat is not correct, because the same effect would stop the radiation from leaving the stratosphere and re-entering the troposphere. The quantities would be about the same in both directions resulting in no net effect for absorption by "greenhouse gases". The difference between stratosphere and troposphere are only relevant to convection, not radiation, though the density decreases with height.

There are a thousand other reasons why carbon dioxide does not create global warming, but this reason is the most basic. It applies to all greenhouse gases and shows why there is no significant "greenhouse" effect from any of them.

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