It’s been a long time since I’ve read an article with convincing evidence linking greenhouse gases to global temperatures. So I strongly recommend “Evidence of Recent Causal Decoupling Between Solar Radiation and Global Temperature” by Pasini, Triacca and Attanasio in Environmental Research Letters.
Part of the reason I find this convincing is that I have a great deal of familiarity with the techniques being used; the usual list of statistical mistakes common in environmental research doesn’t seem to be made here.
What they have done is construct a 3 variable VAR with non-stationary data, and bootstrapped the distributions of causality tests. In short, they’ve done relatively standard analysis that a macroeconomist would be comfortable with. I’ve only spent about 10 minutes with the paper, but I’m OK with what I see so far.
And they conclude that global temperatures decoupled from solar radiation over the last 50 years, but did not decouple from greenhouse gases.
Note that this research isn’t very much different from stuff I did for personal edification in the 90’s, that convinced me that the relation between greenhouse gases and global warming wasn’t important. But now … the technique is more advanced.
The next step, would be to apply some standard VAR analyses to see if the causality they’ve found is large enough to be meaningful. I still have doubts about this: standard economic analysis shows that temperature is very inelastic with respect to greenhouse gases, which in turn are very inelastic with respect to industrial production.
Via Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed.
That’s a great site you folks have been carrying out there.
Posted by: thomassinger0 | November 27, 2012 at 10:11 PM