If the Earth's temperatures rose more before 1940 and carbon emissions exploded after 1940, how do carbon emissions cause global warming?

https://www.quora.com/If-the-Earths-temperatures-rose-more-before-1940-and-carbon-emissions-exploded-after-1940-how-do-carbon-emissions-cause-global-warming

https://www.quora.com/If-the-Earths-temperatures-rose-more-before-1940-and-carbon-emissions-exploded-after-1940-how-do-carbon-emissions-cause-global-warming/answer/TL-Winslow

My reply:

It’s too bad, but ever since Mann’s 1988 Congressional testimony sounding alarms about rising CO2, there has been a mad scramble to develop proof that it’s causing global warming, even though at the time he said he didn’t see any evidence yet. Ever since, the best the true believers can come up with is a whopping 0.1C-0.2C rise per decade. Rise in what? “Global average temperatures”. This is where a con game comes in. This is not a physical quantity, but is a tricked-up statistic with a combination of often doubtful measurement station data and climate models that have CO2 global warming subroutines. Notice it’s not global average daily max temperatures. These are physical. No living thing can detect a rise in a yearly average anything, only a constant rise all year long, which isn’t the case as the recent cold wave in North America shows. If this is all the proof the true believers can come up with, their case is unproven, sorry. Indeed until their Armageddon-like claims of many degrees increase in global avg. temps come true, or better yet, snow disappears in the winter so we all know the globe has really heated, the climate alarmists are premature and playing fortune teller instead of scientist. Like real fortune tellers, the real motive is money, isn’t it?
Could this paucity of real warming be because CO2 actually doesn’t control temperatures, because no matter how much IR energy it absorbs up in the atmosphere somewhere, there’s no magic stairway to send it back down to the surface, but instead CO2 is on a stairway up to heaven along with the rest of the atmosphere, rising via adiabatic expansion to space, where it dissipates the energy harmlessly. It’s like worrying about hot smoke after it leaves the chimney; the heat can never return down the chimney and cook the meal twice. So from day one this basic misunderstanding has made CO2-driven AGW a hoax.
Here’s my devastating explanation in more detail, showing how the basic laws of physics refute the CO2-driven Greenhouse Warming Theory, meaning that we still don’t know what really controls the climate, and are wasting big bucks whistling Dixie in the dark.

TLW's Two Cents Worth on Climate Change