Mike Lorrey writes- PAY ATTENTION CLIMATE ALARMISTS:
“The phrase ‘correlation does not imply causation’ goes back to 1880 (according to Google Books). However, use of the phrase took off in the 1990s and 2000s, and is becoming a quick way to short-circuit certain kinds of arguments.
In the late 19th century, British statistician Karl Pearson introduced a powerful idea in math: that a relationship between two variables could be characterized according to its strength and expressed in numbers. An exciting concept, but it raised a new issue: how to interpret the data in a way that is helpful, rather than misleading. When we mistake correlation for causation, we find a cause that isn’t there, which is a problem. However, as science grows more powerful and government more technocratic, the stakes of correlation — of counterfeit relationships and bogus findings — grow larger.”
From Slashdot: The History of ‘Correlation Does Not Imply Causation’
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From the Slate article referenced by Slashdot:
The graph below, again from Google Books, shows the shift in language that marked this change in spirit: Up until the early 1900s, causation showed up more often than correlation in the corpus; then the concepts flip. (I’ll let someone else explain why correlations have been trending downward since 1976.)
Bob Ryan says:
October 5, 2012 at 2:41 am
Bob, what we see in this chart is not that CO2 is forcing climate, but that climate is forcing CO2. The relationship, which holds true since 1958, when the era of modern, accurate measurements began, is approximately
dCO2/dt = k*(T – To)
where “k” and “To” are parameters to be determined. This is a local relationship. How it holds outside the bounds of the observational interval is unknown. But, it is enough to assign the lion’s share of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 over that interval to natural forcing.
When you integrate the relationship, you find that temperature is responsible for the change in CO2 we saw in the last half century, not humankind. Humans cannot have been responsible, because the rate of change of emissions is affine over the time period, and there is no room to insert an affine function in the relationship above. The conclusion which necessarily follows is that human inputs are rapidly sequestered, and natural processes dominate.