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DomeC Correlate with smoothing
Notes:
This plot is the smoothed CO2 and temperature correlation results for DomeC. The green line shows the correlation of future CO2 levels to temperature and the magenta line shows the correlation of future temperature to CO2 levels. Because the green line is always above the magenta line, CO2 levels are always more correlated to past temperatures than to future temperatures. The relatively high correlation around 0 is due to the fact that if the temperature or CO2 levels are changing, they are likely to continue to change in the same direction. Discounting this, past CO2 levels and future temperatures are completely uncorrelated. This is indicated by the magenta lines average value of zero between 3K and 9K years.
This has an important implication for presumed positive feedback effects related to CO2. Even if there is some kind of unknown positive feedback effect of CO2 on temperature, there must be another unknown factor providing exactly offsetting negative feedback.