09 April 2009

20 who deny CO2 is correlated with temperature

Over in my Does CO2 correlate with temperature? post, some of the commentators are claiming that nobody says CO2 is not correlated with temperature. This is odd, since I name a source there which does so. But, in the spirit of my 20 links game, here are 20 (more) who say so.

First, a word about doing science, and weeding sources. One thing about doing science is that you're supposed to read the source you're commenting on. As some commentators demonstrated, they didn't read my article before making their comment. That would have been the easiest way to discover a source which did as claimed. More work, but still easy, is to do a search and see if the comment is out there. Now, as you know from reading my 20 links game earlier, I think pretty much any statement you'd care to name is being asserted somewhere on the web, and probably in at least 20 different locations. If you've been looking at the web for a while, you've seen some pretty strange statements being made seriously.

Where the commentators agree with me is that it's absurd to claim that there's no correlation between temperature and CO2. Consequently, any source which does claim so is unreliable and you'd be better off moving on. (Oddly, they don't seem to agree with this part.)

So, here are 20 sources (well, 21) which assert no correlation between temperature and CO2, and are referring to recent (last 150 years) climate:
  1. Joseph D'Aleo on Jennifer Marohasy's blog
  2. Powerpoint presentation, see slide 47
  3. Ken Gregory
  4. Christopher Horner, Lawyer
  5. Lee C. Gerhard, Center for Science and Public Policy
  6. Warwick Hughes, repeat of preceding
  7. Article by Dennis Avery, quoting Timothy Patterson
  8. Article by Timothy Patterson, published in Financial Post, copied to this site
  9. An englishman's castle, blog
  10. Noel Sheppard, at Newsbusters
  11. Glen Meakam, Pittsburgh Tribune Review 25 January 2009 (cached version)
  12. Joseph D'Aleo, on his own site
  13. Jim Manzi, taking Steve Milloy to task for claiming no correlation
  14. Capitalism Magazine, quoting Timothy Ball
  15. Martin Durkin, the producer of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle
  16. Geoaffair
  17. Jules has been engaging in discussion and documenting Hans Labohm's denial of any correlation between CO2 and Temperature (Labohm goes farther than any others I've seen, and denies it for all time scales from tenths of years to millions of years)
  18. Christopher Monckton at Science and Public Policy
  19. Paul Drallos, PhD (Physics)
  20. user 'bravo22c' at the Telegraph, UK
  21. Alan Caruba in the Canada Free Press


Took 90 minutes since I didn't accept blog comments -- all these are original articles, sources that get quoted elsewhere. I also didn't take many copies of the same sources, which, again, would have shortened the search. Also no videos. But I threw in a bonus cite. Some cherry pick their periods ('last 10 years', '1945-1970' or the like), some leave it at 'recent', without saying what 'recent' means.

As I discussed before, you need 20-30 years to be talking about a climate trend. So the sources which use only 10 or so are being doubly misleading.

7 comments:

Greyshark said...

Come on, I have seen 68 years, was born in 1941. OK, a correlation between CO2 and temperatures existed during 1979-1998. That is 20 years. But what about the other 48 years? No temperature increase, actually a respectable cooling!

Remember, correlation is not causation!

Robert Grumbine said...

I do recall that correlation is not causation. That's why I only talked about correlation.

I'm afraid, though, that you didn't remember to apply this yourself. I show the correlation for 1959-2007, which is positive, as is the correlation for 1850-2007. If you compute the correlation between 1941 and 2008, you'll again see a positive correlation (and a very large one) between temperature and CO2 levels.

The thing is, you're combining several steps into one. That's usually a mistake. And it definitely misleads you in this case. In science, we get very focused on what we're looking at. The existence of a correlation means, to us, merely that there's a correlation. Whether there's causation, and which thing causes what or whether something else is causing both, are separate questions. In this case, you're commenting as if a correlation between two variables means that one must always increase every time the other does, with no lag, etc., etc.. This isn't true, even as to doing a correlation. More relevant, Weather will still happen.

Greyshark said...

All correlations are not equal. Some have better fit than others, thus increasing the possibility of causation. I will agree that there is a small underlying positive temperature trend from 1850 until now, using the hadcrut3 data set. Not very large, 160 years and 0.8 degrees Celsius at most gives 0.05 degrees Celsius per decade. Possibly just a natural trend coming out of the Little Ice Age?

No, I find the smaller trends more interesting. The last one, 1977-2006, was a warming trend. The one before that, 1944-1976, was a cooling trensd. Then we had 1912-1943, a warming trend, and 1879-1911 when we had global cooling. And from the start of hadcrut3, 1850, until 1878 temperatures were rising. Interesting enough all periods are about 30 years long, corresponding to three solar cycles. And even more interesting, the warming periods have two odd-numbered cycles while the cooling periods are dominated by two even-numbered cycles.

The trendshifts are precisely at solar minimums. And in addition, the PDO (I feel sure you know about the PDO...) has shifted its mode more or less in tune with this melody. The latest shift, to cooling mode, was in 2006. The shift before that was in 1976, to warming mode. We also see shifts in 1944 and 1912.

So what do you think about the future? James Hansen has stuck his neck out and claimed we will have new record temperatures in 1-2 years from now. Do you believe him?

As I said, some data fits are better than others. So will we see 30 more years of cooling, taking into consideration that solar cycle 24 is going to be weak and cycle 25 possibly even weaker?

I'm asking an honest question here. Since retiring I have been able to read up on the climate change debate, but I am no expert (I do have corresponding to a M.Sc. , but that was 45 years ago and my career was in IT) and am willing to listen to anybody.

Victor said...

I read a couple of these links you posted and in none of them were there denials of correlation. They did however, claim that a different causal effect was in place. You seem to be building a strawman here.

Lars Karlsson said...

I really love the graph that D'Aleo provides on the first link, the one with temperature anomaly and CO2 ppm from 1998 to the beginning of 2008. The scales are set so that 1 degree C corresponds to 30 ppm CO2. Quite a nice way to "disprove" a correlation.

Robert Grumbine said...

Victor: The correlation is the correlation -- irrespective of what causes what. Yes, many of those sites appeal to CO2 responding to temperature (erroneously, but that's another post) as to causation the last 150 years. But if so, they shouldn't also say no correlation as, certainly, D'Aleo does (I went back and reread the first link in the list). If there were no correlation, then temperature can't be causing anything on CO2.

Corinne Civish said...

Who believes in AGW

http://logicalscience.com/consensus/consensusD1.htm

National Academy of Sciences, United States of America
Australian Academy of Sciences
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
American Chemical Society - (world's largest scientific organization with over 155,000 members)
Stratigraphy Commission - Geological Society of London - The world's oldest and the United Kingdom's largest geoscience organization
Engineers Australia (The Institution of Engineers Australia)
Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts
American Meteorological Society (AMS)
Caribbean Academy of Sciences
National Research Council USA
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)
French Academy of Sciences
German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina
Indonesian Academy of Sciences
Royal Irish Academy
US Geological Survey (USGS)
NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
World Meteorological Organization
Academy of Sciences Malaysia
Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Royal Society (UK)
Academia Brasileira de Ciéncias,Brazil
Académie des Sciences, France
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Italy
Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
Royal Society of Canada, Canada
Science Council of Japan, Japan
Academy of Science of South Africa, South Africa
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Indian National Science Academy, India
Academia Mexicana de Ciencias, Mexico
International Council on Science
The Petition - 11,885+ individual scientists listed by name

A petition signed by 52 Nobel Laureates, 63 National Medal of Science recipients, 195 members of the National Academies, and over 11,885+ other scientists criticizing the misuse and politicization of science in Washington. The list is continually growing so these are minimum numbers.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. But it's a start.

Corinne Civish
ccivish@gmail.com