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Ice Core Temp+CO2

Notes:

This is the famous plot, used in Al Gore’s movie, showing that CO2 and temperature are related over time. While some kind of connection is inescapable, we must dig deeper to understand how they are connected.

There are 3 possibilities for this connection. Either temperature changes are affecting CO2 changes, CO2 changes are affecting temperature changes, or both affect each other. In the case that both effect each other, the relative strengths of the dependencies and time periods over which they act must be determined.

By examining the plot, it appears that the features of the green line are almost always to the left (i.e. more recent) of similar features of the blue line. This is consistent with CO2 changes (green) being dependent on temperature changes (blue), moreover; the delay when temperature is falling seems larger than when the temperature is rising. While this is only a subjective observation, a simple correlation technique will be applied to objectively determine cause and effect.