Why “Can you provide empirical measured proof of how much warming is caused by CO2?” is a really stupid question – Watts Up With That?

The question—“Can you provide empirical measured proof of how much warming is caused by CO2?”—on its surface appears perfectly rational, even scientific. Yet, despite its appeal, it’s not just unanswerable with current methods—it also reflects a misunderstanding of how climate science works. And no matter one’s position in the climate debate, including those deeply skeptical of climate alarmism, it’s important to recognize why this question, as framed, is fundamentally flawed.

1. It Demands the Impossible: Controlled Experimentation on a Planetary Scale

The key issue is that it requests measured proof—in other words, direct empirical measurement of a variable in isolation. But Earth is not a laboratory. You can’t take one Earth, run it with 300 ppm CO₂, and another with 420 ppm, hold everything else constant (solar irradiance, ocean currents, volcanic activity, cloud cover, etc.), and then observe the difference in temperature.

Climate, by nature, is a complex, chaotic, coupled system. We can measure correlations, make inferences, and run models—but there is no laboratory setting where you can isolate CO₂ and “measure” its exact contribution to global mean surface temperature in the real world. Demanding that kind of empirical isolation is akin to asking for direct proof that one puff of a cigarette causes cancer—it’s an unreasonable standard for complex systems with multiple interacting variables.

2. Confuses Forcing with Attribution

CO₂ is a radiative forcing—an input to the climate system, not a direct output. What we do have, via satellite spectroscopy, are measurements showing CO₂ absorbing and re-emitting infrared radiation. We measure the “back radiation” impinging on ground stations. That’s measurable and uncontroversial. The effect size of this forcing, however, is not directly measurable in isolation. It is inferred through modeling and statistical attribution studies.

These studies attempt to assign fractions of observed warming to different causes—greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar variability, land use change, etc. They rely on climate models and statistical methods, not isolated laboratory measurements. So while you can ask how much warming is attributed to CO₂ based on models and assumptions, you cannot measure it directly.

For those chafing at the word “modeling“, it is through modeling that we convert satellite measurements of brightness into global temperatures. i.e. UAH 6.1.

3. It Plays Into the Hands of Alarmists by Oversimplifying the Debate

Ironically, asking for “measured proof” of CO₂-caused warming as a rhetorical trap often backfires. It allows climate activists to claim skeptics “don’t understand science” because, technically, the question is malformed. It allows them to redirect the conversation toward a debate about “settled science” at the molecular level (CO₂ absorbs infrared radiation), which is not where the real debate lies.

The serious skeptical position doesn’t hinge on denying radiative physics, but on questioning how much warming will result, how models perform, how feedbacks behave, how reliable the temperature record is, and most critically—whether climate policies based on uncertain projections make any sense. That’s where the fight should be, not on strawman arguments about measured proof.

4. It Obscures the Real Problem: Model Dependence and Feedback Assumptions

Even the IPCC doesn’t claim that the warming due to CO₂ can be directly measured. Instead, they use “attribution studies” based on model simulations. For instance, they simulate Earth’s climate with anthropogenic CO₂ and without it, and then compare the model runs to observed temperatures.

The result is a claim like “most of the observed warming since 1950 is very likely due to human activity”—but this is a model-based inference, not a measurement. The feedbacks assumed in these models (especially water vapor and clouds) are poorly understood, and small changes in those assumptions cause large swings in warming predictions.

A reasonable skeptic would focus here: not on denying that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, but on highlighting the immense uncertainty in how much warming results from doubling CO₂ (climate sensitivity), which still ranges widely in the literature. That’s the intelligent battlefront—not a demand for something no one can provide.

5. It Encourages a Binary Thinking Trap

Skeptics often fall into a trap by arguing as if the entire climate narrative hinges on the CO₂ molecule being harmful. But even if CO₂ is warming the planet somewhat, the real debate is over magnitude, timing, impacts, and cost-benefit tradeoffs of climate policies.

Demanding measured proof of how much warming is caused by CO₂ invites a yes/no answer, when in reality the issue is one of probability distributions, confidence intervals, and uncertainty. This plays right into the absolutist thinking that dominates mainstream climate rhetoric.

Ask Smarter Questions—Because the Data Isn’t That Smart

Demanding measured proof of how much warming is caused by CO₂ is a rhetorical dead end—not because it’s unreasonable to seek evidence, but because it betrays a misunderstanding of what’s empirically measurable in a planetary climate system. The question collapses under its own demand for impossible precision in a noisy, chaotic, and multifactorial system.

A far more productive—and scientifically grounded—skepticism targets the soft underbelly of the climate consensus: the assumptions, uncertainties, and measurement issues underpinning the entire narrative.

Start with the temperature record itself. Long-term surface temperature series suffer from significant reliability issues. Stations have aged, moved, been surrounded by urban development, and upgraded with different instrumentation—all of which can introduce inhomogeneities and artificial trends. Adjustments to the raw data are often opaque and poorly justified, raising questions about how much warming is real versus “corrected” into existence.

Then there’s the far greater uncertainty in estimating global variables like ocean heat content—a metric central to claims of “unprecedented warming.” Before ARGO floats were deployed in the early 2000s, ocean temperatures were measured by a ragtag mix of ship intakes and bathythermographs, yielding sparse, uneven, and inconsistent data. Even now, ARGO floats only sample a small fraction of the ocean volume and don’t reach deep enough to detect long-term thermal trends with high confidence.

On top of this shaky empirical foundation, climate modelers layer their assumptions about radiative forcing, feedbacks, and cloud behavior to produce projections decades into the future—projections which have consistently overestimated warming in the short term.

So rather than asking for something that can’t be measured—like isolated proof of CO₂’s warming effect—skeptics should keep the focus on what can be measured, and on how poorly. Ask:

• How have the temperature data been adjusted, and what impact do those adjustments have?
• How sensitive are climate models to initial conditions and subjective parameter tuning?
• What are the error margins in ocean heat content estimates over time?
• Why do historical reconstructions rely so heavily on modeled reanalysis rather than direct observation?
• Are mitigation policies cost effective?
• What unintentional harm can be caused by mitigation policies.
• Why aren’t the benefits of increased CO₂ used in calculations of effects on society?

This is where honest, disciplined skepticism belongs—not in demanding a measurement that physics and Earth system complexity simply won’t allow, but in pointing out the wobbly scaffolding on which sweeping, costly policies are being erected, assumptions, uncertainties, and modeling limitations that underlie the entire edifice of climate policy. That’s where skepticism can be scientifically rigorous, effective, and intellectually honest.

Related