Reagent-quality Dyslogic
Article in latest New Superstitionist:

Ashley Ballantyne at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues analysed 4-million-year-old Pliocene peat samples from Ellesmere Island in the Arctic archipelago to find out what the climate was like when the peat formed.

At that time, CO2 levels are thought to have been close to current levels – around 390 parts per million – but global temperatures were around 2 to 3 °C warmer than today. It was the last warm period before the onset of the Pleistocene glaciation, and is used by climate researchers as a model for our future climate.

Previous studies using computer models have suggested that the Pliocene Arctic was also warmer than it is today – up to 10 °C warmer. A little warming can trigger a lot more in the Arctic because the loss of light-reflecting sea ice and the spread of plants across the land increase the amount of solar energy that is absorbed.

Ballantyne's team estimated the temperature of the period at which the peat formed by measuring three things that are affected by temperature: the concentration of various chemical compounds, levels of a certain isotope in tree rings and the amount and types of fossilised vegetation.

The group's analysis suggests the samples formed when average local temperatures were about -0.5 °C. That is 19 °C warmer than temperatures today – more than the previous computer models had estimated.

"These results should be alarming," says Ballantyne. Although it could take centuries for current global temperatures to respond to rising CO2 levels, we can expect the Arctic to warm much more than the rest of the planet, he says.

Summing up, the Arctic at that time had approx the same CO2 as today, but it was 19C (or about 62 real degrees) warmer. And Ballantyne says this should serve as a warning that increasing the CO2 will burn us up.

Any sane human being, any scientist or careful observer whose brain was not fried by Gaia-worshiping fanaticism, would treat this set of measurements as an absolute elimination of CO2 as a factor. (At least for this pairing of places and times.) Whatever was causing the change in temperature here, it was NOT carbon dioxide.

= = = = =

Put it in another context. Say you're involved in designing a new car. Your current job assignment: see if opening the sunroof has any effect on the speed of the car. You do a careful test of one car, with sunroof fully open. The car reaches 62 MPH. You carefully note the result. Now you wait a week and try again, same car, same sunroof position, but different roads and weather conditions. This time the car won't move at all. Speed is 0 MPH.

Constant cause, hugely different result.

If you were a "climate scientist" you'd conclude that the position of the sunroof was the only important variable, because it was the same in both experiments.

  [Constant Cause]
+ [Different Result]
= [Total Correlation] in the mind of a crimatologist.

Or more accurately,
  [Any Set Of Circumstances]
+ [Any Other Set Of Circumstances]
= [DANGER WILL ROBINSON! HUMANS EXHALING POISON!!!! MUST KILL ALL HUMANS!!!!]

But if you were a moderately logical person, you'd instantly conclude that the sunroof could not be the sole controller of speed. You might know from other experiments that it has an effect, but from this experiment alone you can only conclude that speed depends on many other factors. Hills, headwinds, condition of engine, quality of fuel, setting of gas pedal, setting of brakes, and so on.
  ¶ 10:48 AM