More bad news for Alarmists: Correlation does not imply Causation.

Scott Adam's incisive comic strip Dilbert on Nov28, 2011 revealed that correlation does not imply causation.

Some biting examples from tylervigen.com's 

Data Sources: US Census Bureau and National Science Foundation

Correlation: 98.51%

Hmmm.....well, how about -

Data Sources: US Dept of Agriculture and National Science Foundation

and the correlation percentage? 95.86%

There are many other Spurious Correlations on the site.

How about correlation between Temperature and Atmospheric Carbon dioxide?

We know that, from the Vostok Ice core data (re-graphed by Jo Nova)

The bottom line is that rising temperatures cause carbon  (dioxide) levels to rise. Carbon (dioxide) may still influence temperatures, but these ice cores are neutral on that. If both factors caused each other to rise significantly, positive feedback would become exponential. We’d see a runaway greenhouse effect. It hasn’t happened. Some other factor is more important than carbon dioxide, or carbon (dioxide)’s role is minor.

Example: Source Jo Nova

Ok, Let's get a little more up to date. Here are the data for the last 10,000 years:

Source

Not much correlation there!

And in the twentieth century, global temperature had three periods of rising temperature interspersed with periods of falling or neutral temperatures:

1850-2010 - source

and during these periods of rising and falling temperature, what was happening to atmospheric carbon dioxide? (The Scripps Institution started recording CO2 from 1958.)

Wood for Trees

You guessed it! Rising at a virtually constant rate. No correlation there!

Why do the Alarmists keep blaming innocent CO2?