correlation causality casualty

CLIMATE CHANGE

Jethro awoke one morning to the crowing of a rooster, before the sun was up, but yet it was mildly light out. He popped out of bed and over to the window. The rooster crowed again, and just then the sun first crested over the horizon in Beverly Hills. He recollecting observing a similar phenomenon back in the hills where he grew up, so he knew it could not be a coincidence. He went running downstairs where Granny was wrestling up some breakfast. "Granny, Granny! That old rooster is what makes the sun come up!" Granny only glanced up for a second and said, "Boy I thought you had a sixth grade education?" Jethro retorted "I do Granny, I do!" So that evening Jethro decided since he was so smart he would go to the library to read some scientific books. He came across one book on climate change and found a graph with carbon dioxide and earths temperature plotted over the years. He noticed that when CO2 was high so was temperature. He shouted out in the middle of the library "Hot diggity dog! I got here a correlation!" He wrote it down so he would not forget: increasing CO2 concentration increases global temperature. He was so proud of himself and the correlation not realising that a correlation is not the same as causality - that concept was way beyond his sixth grade education, as it is today for many, even highly educated people. But so it is for a religious devotion sometimes