The Proceedings of the Royal Society A has just published two papers by Koutsoyiannis et al. on revisiting causality using stochatics, the first being the theory paper and the second presenting some case studies. One of the case studies in the second paper considered Atmospheric temperature and carbon dioxide concentration, with their results suggesting that
the results in figure 14 suggest a (mono-directional) potentially causal system with T as the cause and [CO2] as the effect.
They then concluded that
[h]ence, the common perception that increasing [CO2] causes increased T can be excluded as it violates the necessary condition for this causality direction
As regular readers will probably realise, this is clearly nonsense. There is overwhelming evidence that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to human-caused CO2 emissions, and that this increase is the dominant cause of the increase in global surface temperatures.
There probably isn’t much point in going through all the reasons why what is suggested in this paper is almost certainly wrong. I thought I might simply highlight that I started a PubPeer thread about this paper and Gavin Cawley has already posted a couple of useful comments. A PubPeer thread about the Zharkova et al. paper produced quite an extensive comment thread and probably played a role in it being retracted.
You might argue that a paper shouldn’t be retracted just because one of the case studies produces results that are almost certainly wrong. On the other hand, you might also argue that if one of their case studies produces such results that it rather undermines their whole method. You might also argue that it’s rather embarassing that one of the Royal Society’s journals could publish a paper with what is, these days, a very obviously wrong result.