I hadn’t gotten around to reading Mark Richardson’s “New study by Skeptical Science author finds 100% of atmospheric CO2 rise is man-made” until this afternoon. I find its import, along with fellow commentators Masters and Benestad, to be on the order of Mudelsee’s 2001 paper “The phase relations among atmospheric CO2 content, temperature and global ice volume over the past 420 ka“, which I think is somewhat famous.  I read Mudselsee better than a lot of geophysics papers since time series analysis is what I do most of the time, and I learn a lot from people like him who work on these difficult problems.

Ironically, Richardson, and Masters and Benestad had an easier time with their papers because the subject of their Comments, the Humlum, Stordahl, and Solheim paper from 2013, did all the set-up for them, simply and apparently making mistakes in inference, and they corrected them, arriving at a powerful way of demonstrating the tight connection between human emissions of greenhouse gases and temperature increases.

I wish I could comment from a professional perspective, but I only have Richardson’s summary to work with, and, in fairness, I don’t want to do that unless I have full access to all the original papers. I don’t.  It’s behind a paywall, and, while I subscribe as an individual to many geophysics journals, this isn’t one of them. Not willing to pay the one-off fees to get these.

I also like it when improperly done analyses get corrected, as in this very public instance.  Not only did Humlum, Stordahl, and Solheim get it wrong but so, apparently, did their referees.  This surprises me not, as I’ve seen far worse in my business.

It is gratifying, however, to see troyca’s assessment of the same situation, and how it comes out right. And he’s a software engineer.  There’s hope yet!