Stossel on Global Warming Part II: Where’s the Causality?

Even Governor Ahhnold Schwarzenegger says the debate is over, and apparently there’s not much difference between Holocaust skeptics and global warming skeptics. Today, FreedomWorks released John Stossel’s “Give Me a Break” video refuting claims that the global warming debate reached full consensus.

In addition to displaying apocalyptic weather-related scenarios and animated cartoons of polar bears attempting to survive on a thin sheet of ice, Al Gore’s documentary attempts to support his claims with facts but rarely are they correct. Certainly Gore impressed everyone with his moving line graph shown in the video (picture here) showing the causality between carbon dioxide and temperature over the past 650,000 years. Stossel shows, by merging the graphs together, that temperature increases actually come before carbon levels.

In fact, one interesting truth is that by the time the movie was made, analysts found that:

“Temperatures actually increased on average 800 years before CO2 started to increase. When event B occurs after event A, it is really hard to argue that B caused A.”

Furthermore, in the National Center for Policy Analysis’, A Global Warming Primer (PDF), page eleven analyzes the relationship of carbon dioxide and temperature rise over a much longer period – 600 million years ago. It simply shows:

“Over long periods of time, there is no close relationship between CO2 levels and temperature.”

Al Gore believes businesses are paying scientists to create the illusion of a debate; however, by declining every opportunity to support his claims, Gore ended the debate before it began.