Someone recommended the work of Liang recently in connection with causation and attribution studies, and their application to CO₂ and climate change. Liang’s work is related to information flows and transfer entropies. As far as I know, the definitive work on that is James, Barnett, and Crutchfield, “Information Flows? A Critique of Transfer Entropies.” The former paper claims, in part,

The whole new formalism is derived from first principles, rather than as an empirically defined ansatz, with the property of causality guaranteed in proven theorems. This is in contrast to other causality analyses, say that based on Granger causality or convergent cross mapping (CCM)

Well I’ve written about CCM here before, in 2013, 2016, and just recently.

Anyway, I don’t see anything obviously superior regarding Liang’s information flows approach, at least in comparison with Granger causality or CCM, and, so, I’ll take conclusions about causation of CO₂ and climate they derive with a big grain of salt. I prefer Egbert van Nes, Marten Scheer, Victor Brovkin, Timothy Lenton, Hao Ye, Ethan Deyle, and George Sugihara on “Causal feedbacks in climate change.”