Greenhouse Gases? On Neptune?

First, read the beginning of this article, note carefully the graphs and their import, then come back here. I’ll wait for you.

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Dum de dum…

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Are you back? Good.
Now, unless you spent about an hour studying that synopsis, you may have missed this:

What would seem so simple statistically is complicated by the degrees of freedom in the various time series which is related to the serial correlation in the data (e.g., next year’s value is highly dependent on this year’s value).

– which is a fancy way of saying that the fudge-factors involved are large enough (and ambiguous enough) that the raw data can be tortured to say almost anything.

Still, this is a pretty impressive correlation:

Nonetheless, they find that the correlation coefficient between solar irradiance and Neptune’s brightness is near 0.90 (1.00 is perfect).

In plain English-speak, it says that temperature observations of Neptune since 1980 show a strong correlation to temperature observations on the Earth and with photometric observations of related observations of the sun during the same period. It hints that observations of rising temperatures on the earth are better explained by effects of solar radiation changes than by either greenhouse gases or any anthropomorphic effect.

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