A SIMPLE REGRESSION MODEL - WITH AND WITHOUT CO2 EQUIVALENT
All scientists are well aware of the mantra “Correlation does not imply causation” and people have identified examples to illustrate this. Two spurious correlations I remember were one between the number of missionaries sent to Jamaica and the number of illegitimate babies born the following year, and another between the number of nesting storks and the number of babies born in some German towns. That said, correlation can indicate possible links; cancer and smoking being a case in point. When a physical explanation for a phenomenon is known then regression can also indicate the relative importance of different factors. Scafetta’s models discussed at scepticalscience.com are examples of regression models which assume that global temperature can be explained by astronomical and climatic cycles superimposed on an underlying but unexplained trend. With some justification they have been dubbed ‘climastrology’. To look at this in a bit more detail I’ve been playing around with two sim...