Atmospheric CO2and global temperatures: The strength and nature of their dependence

Abstract

There is now considerable scientific consensus that the acknowledged increase in global temperatures is due to the increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide arising from the burning of fossil fuels. Large scale global circulationmodels support this consensus and there have also been statistical studies which relate the trend in temperatures to the carbon dioxide increase. However, causal dependence of one trending series upon another cannot be readily proved using statistical means. In this paper we model the trend corrected series by times series methods which provide a plausible representation of their dependence. A consequence of trend correction and our use of relatively short series is that our model is unable to give precise longterm predictions, but it does illuminate the relationships and interaction between the series.