Causality in CO2 and Temperature

In the early years of the twentieth century, Swedish Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius postulated that CO2 in the atmosphere produced higher temperatures. The causality of higher atmospheric temperatures was the presence of CO2. This has been the theory accepted as reality ever since and the justification for all manner of remedies. But, is it true?

Four scientists at the National Technical University of Athens, Imperial College, London, and the Poznan University of Life Sciences, Posnan, Poland, have performed a study using CO2 figures from a number of sites and temperature readings as well, from the period 1850-2021. They find that causality to be the other way.

The mainstream assumption of the causality direction [CO₂] → T makes a compelling narrative, as everything is blamed on a single cause, the human CO₂ emissions. Indeed, this has been the popular narrative for decades. However, popularity does not necessarily mean correctness, and here we have provided strong arguments against this assumption. Since we have identified atmospheric temperature as the cause and atmospheric CO₂ concentration as the effect, one may be tempted to ask the question: What is the cause of the modern increase in temperature? Apparently, this question is much more difficult to reply to, as we can no longer attribute everything to any single agent.

We do not claim to have the answer to this question, whose study is far beyond the article’s scope. Neither do we believe that mainstream climatic theory, which is focused upon human CO₂ emissions as the main cause and regards everything else as feedback of the single main cause, can explain what happened on Earth for 4.5 billion years of changing climate.