Lets say you have a pot of water that is warming, but you can’t see underneath it. There is a thermometer in the pot, and intermittently you write down the temperature.
And at some point some people come up with a theory that suggests a 2nd candle is now adding its energy to the pot of water. So what are you going to do?
Well, one way is to take the temperature data and graph it and calculate the trend before and after the supposed appearance of the 2nd candle. The change in trend is possibly the extra energy added by the 2nd candle.
Of course the analogy is really about CO2. So lets pick say … 1945 as the supposed appearance of the 2nd candle (CO2).
Why 1945? That is when CO2 really took off. Here is the CDIAC data in million metric tons of CO2.
And here is the data graphed. 1900 to 1945 in red. And 1945 to 2014 in blue. With trends. I used Woodfortrees for the graph and here is the url.
So … what are the trends.
1900 to 1945 = 0.0110866C / Year
1945 to 2014 = 0.00954579 / Year
I conclude the 2nd candle actually changed the trend downward by 0.00154081C / Year.
Maybe it wasn’t a candle? Maybe it was an ice cube.
I think only conspiracy theorists could come up with a 2nd candle theory when the trend actually went down.