Climate Change

Biography

Biography: Frederick House

Abstract

Greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide, are responsible for warming the earth’s climate making the planet habitable for mankind. The physics of this warming is unquestioned. “The big problem, of course, is that evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming. One would be astonished if mankind, with its prodigious release of greenhouse gases….were not having an impact on climate. But how and how much are critical questions?” (1) This paper examines the question of how much relative to increases in carbon dioxide. In general, climate scientists look at global warming as a time series of changing temperature along with a time series of carbon dioxide increases. The issue herein is using one series to explain the other, both of which are singular functions in time. This process seems to be a fault in their analysis procedures. This paper applies the technique of Cross Correlation which is a standard method of estimating the degree to which two series are correlated. Global and hemispheric anomalies of temperature are taken from the HadCRUT4 (United Kingdom) data set and global carbon dioxide concentrations from the EPA (United States). The results indicate a relatively weak correlation of 0.691 globally, 0.689 and 0.662 for northern and southern hemispheres, respectively. A revealing correlation between temperature anomalies and sea level changes was a robust 0.89 as might be expected. Has the scientific community been overplaying the importance of carbon dioxide and not looking carefully at the evidence in front of them?