Climate Change: Linear and Nonlinear Causality Analysis

• Published in: Stats
• Main Authors: Jiecheng Song, Merry Ma
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2023
• Subjects: climate change; global mean surface temperature; global mean sea level; causal analysis; greenhouse gas; vector autoregressive model (VAR); Statistics; HA1-4737; Ice Sheet; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/stats6020040; https://doaj.org/article/9e909852f69d4db9b308a2092bda66a6

The goal of this study is to detect linear and nonlinear causal pathways toward climate change as measured by changes in global mean surface temperature and global mean sea level over time using a data-based approach in contrast to the traditional physics-based models. Monthly data on potential climate change causal factors, including greenhouse gas concentrations, sunspot numbers, humidity, ice sheets mass, and sea ice coverage, from January 2003 to December 2021, have been utilized in the analysis. We first applied the vector autoregressive model (VAR) and Granger causality test to gauge the linear Granger causal relationships among climate factors. We then adopted the vector error correction model (VECM) as well as the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) to quantify the linear long-run equilibrium and the linear short-term dynamics. Cointegration analysis has also been adopted to examine the dual directional Granger causalities. Furthermore, in this work, we have presented a novel pipeline based on the artificial neural network (ANN) and the VAR and ARDL models to detect nonlinear causal relationships embedded in the data. The results in this study indicate that the global sea level rise is affected by changes in ice sheet mass (both linearly and nonlinearly), global mean temperature (nonlinearly), and the extent of sea ice coverage (nonlinearly and weakly); whereas the global mean temperature is affected by the global surface mean specific humidity (both linearly and nonlinearly), greenhouse gas concentration as measured by the global warming potential (both linearly and nonlinearly) and the sunspot number (only nonlinearly and weakly). Furthermore, the nonlinear neural network models tend to fit the data closer than the linear models as expected due to the increased parameter dimension of the neural network models. Given that the information criteria are not generally applicable to the comparison of neural network models and statistical time series models, our next step is to examine the robustness ...