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Thanks. You could start with the data in post 16 and after determining how the measurements are made and what they really represent, put some error bars around the readings and see if 380ppm (today's reading) is off the charts as they claim it is.

Well an actual reading of 380 for that data set would represent about a 5 standard deviation event. This would mean that that measurement was a highly unlikely and extremely unusual event, which tells us ... absolutely nothing.

Natural non linear systems are self correcting and a single high standard deviation event is more likely to followed by an opposing event of similar magnitude in the opposite direction. (mean reversion)

Besides, each individual sample they've taken represents an average over a 1200 year period which introduces more variability than the single study addresses. It's like me trying to guess your weight and saying it's somewhere between 50 pounds and 5,000 pounds. I'm almost certainly right, but it doesn't tell you a thing.

Personally I don't think it's such a great leap suggest that those high levels are due to industrial output. That seems to make sense to me because 5STD's is REALLY high.

But getting from there to anywhere is meaningless based solely upon this data. It's going to take a lot more than that to get where they want to go.

Also, to clarify my other post a bit... when I say that a natural non linear system is prone to mean reversion what I mean is, the current high carbon count could be due to any number of things which haven't been considered. Carbon isn't equally distributed in a smooth and consistent way around the planet, so the high number could be a perfectly normal part of fluctuation due to issues in the measurement process.

That isn't saying that the measurements have been tampered with at all, only that if you continue to take them in the same way for the next 1100 years or so, you might also have a naturally occurring low point in the data as well which will smooth out the current high point.

It's the difference between reasonable conjecture and evidence.