Central England Temperature (part 4)
A sideways look at the longest instrumental record of temperature in the world
In part 3 of this series I promised to come out batting for the other side. I shall take alarmists at their word and derive predictive models for the central England temperature record using nothing but atmospheric CO2 from 1659 onward – you can’t get simpler than that!
We shall start straight in with a scatterplot of the central England mean annual temperature (HADCET) plotted against atmospheric CO2 for the northern hemisphere (please refer back to part 1 for details, sources etc):
There we have it. There is a positive relationship for certain but is this the result of CO2 driving temperatures or temperatures driving CO2? Or could it be something else entirely – like solar particle forcing, for instance? Whatever the causal mechanisms (I presume there’s more than one) if we are going to predict the future we are going to have to model this scatter of historic data points some way or other, and with a vast number of model forms to choose from that task is going to be tricky.