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On Spurious Causality, CO2, and Global Temperature

Philippe Goulet Coulombe, Maximilian Göbel

arXiv 19 Mar 2021 · Statistics — Applications · publishedEconometrics (2021) · 9 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2103.10605 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Stips, Macias, Coughlan, Garcia-Gorriz, and Liang (2016, Nature Scientific Reports) use information flows (Liang, 2008, 2014) to establish causality from various forcings to global temperature. We show that the formulas being used hinges on a simplifying assumption that is nearly always rejected by the data. We propose an adequate measure of information flow based on Vector Autoregressions, and find that most results in Stips et al. (2016) cannot be corroborated. Then, it is discussed which modeling choices (e.g., the choice of CO2 series and assumptions about simultaneous relationships) may help in extracting credible estimates of causal flows and the transient climate response simply by looking at the joint dynamics of two climatic time series.

Citation extraction

34
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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 86% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Liang, X (2014) Unraveling the Cause-Effect Relation between Time Series1.000104100%
2Liang, X (2008) Information Flow within Stochastic Dynamical System1.00073100%
3Goulet Coulombe, P. and Göbel, M (2021) Arctic amplification of anthropogenic forcing: A vector autoregressive analysis1.00053100%
4Montamat, G. and Stock, J (2020) Quasi-experimental estimates of the transient climate response using observational data0.87472100%
5Sims, C. A (1980) Macroeconomics and reality0.87452100%
6Liang, X (2015) Normalizing the Causality between Time Series0.84333100%
7Kilian, L. and Lütkepohl, H (2017) Structural vector autoregressive analysis0.81142100%
8Otto, A., Otto, F., Boucher, O., Church, J., Hegerl, G., Forster, P.… (2013) Energy Budget Constraints on Climate Response0.73732100%
9Bruns, S., Csereklyei, Z., and Stern, D (2020) A Multicointegration Model of Global Climate Change0.58531100%
10Myhre, G., Shindell, D., Bréon, F.-M., Collins, W., Fuglestvedt, J.,… (2013) Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing0.58531100%

Showing the top 10 of 34 scored citations.