THE CONTINUING SEARCH FOR AN ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE-CHANGE SIGNAL - LIMITATIONS OF CORRELATION-BASED APPROACHES

Several recent studies claim to have found evidence of large-scale cli mate changes that were attributed to human influences. These assertion s are based on increases in correlation over time between general circ ulation model prognostications and observations as derived from a cent red pattern correlation statistic. We argue that the results of such s tudies are inappropriate because of limitations and biases in these st atistics which leads us to conclude that the results of many studies e mploying these statistics may be erroneous and, in fact, show little e vidence of a human fingerprint in the observed records.