You can do your own investigations, folks. They actually do publish all the data their conclusions are based on.
As an illustration of this, I downloaded the following two bits of data: global blended land/sea temperature data, and the Mauna Loa CO2 data.
Then I ran some statistical tests on them, to see if temps lag Co2 increases, as you would expect if Co2 is the cause.
I operate under the assumption that as Elite Traders you guys are vaguely familiar with statistics.
Notice that in the papers the right - let me rephrase that - the extreme right uses to say that Co2 lags, they carefully omit the part that says Co2 was found to be coincident with temperature increases, but lagging on temperature decreases.
Now, if you're looking at ice cores covering tens and hundreds of thousands of years, and the lag between Co2 increasing and then temps increasing is only a few years, you're gonna have a tough time seeing that.
But given our current yearly data, we can run some tests to see what the lag might be today.
Results below:
Code:
Lag R squared Std deviation
0 0.82838618126848 0.0898120455513902
1 0.825213857146988 0.0910737930192681
2 0.824933297202645 0.0911795558376441
3 0.831922695691254 0.0898741912977007
4 0.840315601586038 0.0882917917966357
5 0.856886007117941 0.0843806651007023
6 0.858478773100529 0.082165367829109
7 0.855908907707782 0.0818836630392985
8 0.847439197776664 0.0836237947986607
What this shows - besides that the R-squared between these two data series is extremely high, which is suggestive of (but doesn't prove, of course) a strong link - is that if you lag your regression between Co2 and temperature, the best correlation between the two comes when you lag the temp by five to seven years from the year of Co2 data. The standard deviation is at its narrowest at six to seven years. So, best guess from this data is that temperature rises lag Co2 rises by about six to seven years.
Or, to put it in big letters so it's understandable even by folks who can't be bothered to read and comprehend everything before forming an opinion, CO2 LEADS TEMPERATURE, when you run actual and precise data against each other.
Sources:
Temperature anomalies, land/sea global blended, 1880-2008:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
Mauna Loa Co2 annual mean data:
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_mlo.txt