Did anybody catch the "surprisingly good news" that was reported in the Washington Post on Monday, 7 December 2015?

In case you didn't, here are the leading paragraphs of the story, which describes the basic findings of a study by Robert B. Jackson, Josep G. Canadell, Corinne Le Quéré, Robbie M. Andrew, Jan Ivar Korsbakken, Glen P. Peters and Nebojsa Nakicenovic, which was coincidentally published on Monday, 7 December 2015.

Emissions of man-made greenhouse gases appear to have declined slightly in 2015, scientists said Monday, reflecting what experts say is an encouraging, though likely temporary, pause in the steady rise in pollutants blamed for climate change.

The projected dip of 0.6 percent over 2014 levels, if confirmed, marks the first decline in heat-trapping pollutants in a year when the world economy was not in recession, a new analysis shows. Scientists say the drop is tangible evidence of changing behavior as more countries invest in renewable energy such as solar and wind power.

The single biggest factor appears to be a marked reduction in China’s use of coal to make electricity. But other countries, from North America to Europe, also emitted less carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning as governments and consumers shifted to cleaner fuels and more fuel-efficient vehicles, according to a report published Monday in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.

As it happens, Political Calculations became the world's leading authority on the correlation between the changing levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere and the world's economic activity over the last year, an expertise we've developed from scratch through a series of posts on the topic, which we've listed below, where we've also juxtaposed portions of our long running analysis of the relative economic health of China's economy as events have warranted the merging of the two series. See if you can detect any trends in what we've observed (we've highlighted the posts where we've presented the development of the changing level of atmospheric carbon dioxide as an economic indicator):

• China's Imports Crash to Near Zero - 10 June 2014
• How Worrisome Are U.S. Exports to China? - 9 July 2014
• U.S. Economy Rebounds, China Decelerates in June 2014 - 14 August 2014
• U.S.-China Trade Data: U.S. Economy Slows to Sluggish - 9 October 2014
• China in Trade Recession and What Lurks Below the iPhone Economy - 12 November 2014
• Growing Recession Risk in China - 11 December 2014
• A Global Economic Indicator? - 12 February 2015 - We begin developing atmospheric CO₂ levels as an economic indicator.
• China Sank Deeper Into Recession in November 2014 - 14 January 2015
• Chinese Economy Continues in Recession - 10 February 2015
• U.S. Joins China in Recession in January 2015 - 10 March 2015
• China Recession Deepens in February 2015 - 8 April 2015
• Now That's What We Like to Call an Anomaly! - 6 May 2015 - We discuss the influence of the timing of China's Spring Festival (a.k.a. Chinese New Year) on international trade.
• Resolving Anomalies in U.S.-China Trade - 9 June 2015
• The World in Recession - 11 June 2015 - we deepen our analysis of the correlation between changes in global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and recessions around the world.
• China's Import Recession Continues and Weighs on Stocks - 8 July 2015
• Earth's Economy Continues Recessionary Cooling - 14 July 2015 - in which we correlate recessions around the world with changes in atmospheric CO₂ levels.
• Chinese Economy Continues Sputtering - 11 August 2015
• Earth: Recessionary Cooling Continues - 12 August 2015
• The Good News from China - 10 September 2015 - we merge our analyses of U.S.-China trade and changes in global CO₂ levels.
• China Rebounding? - 13 October 2015

In our series of original analyses, what we quickly find is that evidence from international trade data directly contradicts the claims of the study's authors that the recent decline in the rate at which the concentration of carbon dioxide is increasing in the Earth's atmosphere occurred in an environment of economic growth.

Instead, it occurred, as virtually every similar decline in the the rate at which the concentration of global atmospheric CO₂ has occurred, as economic activity has likewise declined globally as Earth's economy has experienced recessionary conditions.

That's not our opinion - that fact is plainly evident in international trade data.

But that's not all that's wrong. The story of a reduction in atmospheric CO₂ emissions presented by the climate scientists is already well out of date, as the Chinese government's actions to stimulate its economy in its efforts to pull the nation out of its recessionary funk early in the first half of 2015 have gained some traction, the effects of which we may directly observe in the trailing year average of the change in global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, where the rate at which CO₂ has resumed increasing after having bottomed in June 2015.

The global atmospheric carbon dioxide source data used to produce our chart above was just updated through October 2015 on Monday, 7 December 2015.

Anecdotally, the recent rebound in China's CO₂ emissions has also been directly observed in China, in what Gizmodo describes as "China's Worst Pollution Crisis Ever", which was also posted on Monday, 7 December 2015.

The bottom line is that the climate scientists behind the study failed to consider economic data that clearly indicated growing recessionary conditions in China during their period of interest, which in turn led to an incorrect conclusion, namely that the observed reduction in the rate at which CO₂ increased in the Earth's atmosphere in 2014 and 2015 occurred in the absence of recession, or more accurately, recessionary conditions.

The climate scientists certainly picked a bad day to launch their media public relations strategy.

References

Jackson, R.B., Canadell, J.G., Le Quéré, C., Andrew, R.M., Korsbakken, J.I., Peters, G.P., Nakicenovic, N. Reaching Peak Emissions. Nature Climate Change (2015) doi:10.1038/nclimate2892. Published online 07 December 2015. Accessed through http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2892.html on 8 December 2015.

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth System Research Laboratory. Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Data. [File Transfer Protocol Text File]. Updated 7 December 2015. Accessed 8 December 2015.

U.S. Census Bureau. Trade in Goods with China. Accessed 8 December 2015.

Notes

Update 8 December 2015 12:10 PM EST: This post has been updated to highlight our series of posts that specifically focus on developing atmospheric carbon dioxide as an economic indicator, and to clarify our "bottom line", where we've added the text indicated in bold face type.