by Dr Les Coleman,Daily Sceptic:
For decades we’ve been told a simple story: more carbon dioxide means higher global temperatures. That simplicity proved politically convincing and underpins the most expensive set of policies in modern history, covering Net Zero targets, taxes and vast subsidies to decarbonise industry, energy and transport within a generation. The world is effectively betting trillions that the temperature dial can be turned down by squeezing CO2emissions.
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But what if that core assumption is far less robust than advertised?
My answer came in an analysis published last month inScience of Climate Changethat used my background as a finance academic the way a financial analyst would interrogate a market hypothesis. In finance, no matter how elegant a theory looks, you still test it against hard data. If the numbers don’t confirm the model, the model gives way, not the other way around..
The starting point is uncontroversial: since the 19th Century both CO2and global temperatures have risen. The correlation is visually potent. But anyone who has worked with time series knows how deceptive such correlations can be. Ice-cream sales and shark attacks rise together in summer; that doesn’t make one the cause of the other. Two trending variables will often appear tightly linked even when the relationship is entirely coincidental.
Econometricians therefore strip out time trends and examine how annual changes relate to each other. Does each year’s increase in CO2reliably produce a corresponding nudge in temperature? When we look at the data since reliable measurements began around 1960, the answer is awkward. CO2has risen sharply, yet the rate of temperature change has not moved in lockstep. In fact, the annual changes diverge. If CO2were the master control knob, you would expect accelerations in CO2to march closely with accelerations in temperature. They don’t.
I stress-tested this across multiple temperature and CO2datasets. The result was the same: the neat, linear linkage between CO2levels and temperature weakens once you look beneath the headline trend. The famous correlation appears, at least in part, to be a statistical mirage.
Then comes causality. For CO2to be the principal driver of warming, changes in CO2must consistently lead changes in temperature. You can’t have the thermometer moving first. Yet simple regressions show no clear lead-lag pattern in the levels. And when we switch to annual changes, temperature movements often lead those in CO2, not the other way round. That should raise eyebrows.
In finance we talk about the “joint test problem”: you often can’t measure a key variable directly and end up assuming the very thing you are testing. Climate science runs straight into this. The quantity ‘anthropogenic warming’ cannot be observed; models infer it. But because those same models assume that solar and volcanic effects explain everything that isn’t CO2and are tuned to match past temperatures, any conclusions risk circularity. The theory looks right because it was effectively built into the machinery from the beginning.
Source: SGT Report
