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I don't mean to be glib, but intuiting a linear relationship from correlation in a complex system is famously unreasonable.
Whenever this debate comes up i'm just reminded of so called technical analysis and all the fallacies that come up in it. Just substitute temperature for the price of a stock and you got them all:
And so on and so on. People just don't seem to have the humility to accept that complex systems are hard to model. That's not to say the climate scientists are necessarily wrong, but it's tremendously difficult to actually make a valid argument either way, and such a small proportion of the debate is that.
No we can't just eyeball it, for the same reason you can't just eyeball your options strategy unless you want to donate all your money to Wall Street.
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