As decades of climate-doomsday cult 'AGW' propaganda have made abundantly clear, the world is supposedly endangered from rising human CO2 emissions...that produces a corresponding rapid and accelerarting global warming...which then results in CAGW hell for civilization...unfortunately for the IPCC (and alarmists), their own empirical evidence refutes the hypothesis and eviscerates the entire concept that CO2 is some sort of "control knob" thermostat for Mother Earth....
Simply stated, the climate reality facts do not bode well for those who still promulgate that Earth's environment is in 'crash & burn' mode from human CO2 emissions.
Whether it is the unanimous opinion by scientists regarding the 18-year "global warming" pause; or the last 9 years for the complete lack of major hurricanes; or the inexplicable and surprisingly thick Antarctic sea ice; or the boring global sea level rise that is a tiny fraction of coastal-swamping magnitude; or food crops exploding with record production; or multiple other climate signals - it is now blatantly obvious the current edition of the AGW hypothesis is highly suspect.
Not only is the AGW hypothesis invalidated by close to twenty years of empirical evidence, the CO2 as a "control knob" concept has been shed of any practical merit.
This has been discussed multiple times at 'C3' over recent years. Now, stepping back a few decades, during a 1988 Congressional staged testimony - conspiracy to mislead comes to mind - the top NASA climate expert predicted that 'business as usual' CO2 emissions would cause rapid and accelerated global warming.
Eventually, building on that 1988 performance, other climate experts developed a hypothesis that CO2 acted as the proverbial control-knob thermostat for the global temperature.
But in reality, is that even remotely accurate?
The above reality chart of empirical evidence affirms what the IPCC truly does not want to discuss: the "control-knob" concept is literally a myth.
The chart plots two-year temperature changes since 1988, with the respective two-year CO2 changes (ppm). It has been 26 years since that testimony-performance, thus there are 13 two-periods plotted on the chart. In addition, the linear trend for the HadCRUT4 gold-standard temperature dataset and NOAA's CO2 dataset are shown moving in opposite directions.
There is no doubt. The increasing CO2 changes are not producing the requisite increasing temperature changes, as predicted. Visually, the correlation between the two appears very lame, at best. The actual r2 is a meager 0.12 - yes, that's two plus decades of statistical nothingness.
Conclusion: Those stubborn climate facts are not kind to the ever-fading, CO2-induced global warming hypothesis. Climate change is always happening but it is highly unlikely that the miniscule trace-gas CO2 is a major driver (sure, a minor player, but not one that controls the world's fate). Time for policymakers to abandon the control-knob myth and instead focus on adaption preparation for all types of climate change.
Additional global and regional temperature charts exhibiting the lack of CO2 influence.
Note: The chart plots and linear trends were created using Excel, and the HadCRUT4 dataset and NOAA CO2 dataset. The plots cover discrete two-year periods, starting with October 1988. The CO2 change is scaled to one-tenth of actual (so that temp changes are visually apparent). Hey, don't know how to chart the above in Excel? It's easy to produce charts - you can do it too! Go here to learn how.