My kiddo has been obsessed with the PBS Show “Weather Hunters”, and honestly – same. I’ve learned an embarrassing amount weather and climate, like what an anemometer does (seriously, who knew that?)The producers of the show, of course, dug into a little on the changing climate – which I’ve always taken at face-value. But challenging my bias, I thought I would dig in a bit.
Scope
Overall, I’ve always heard that the earth is heating up, due primarily to greenhouse gasses. This should be a pretty easy to run experiment.
Null Hypothesis: Emissions have no significant correlation to changing earth temperatures.
Alternative Hypothesis: Emissions have a significant correlation to changing earth temperatures.
Methodology
Digging into the publicly accessible data-sources, it looks like NOAA has a robust data-set on average temperatures, events, and a ton of other useful metrics. Likewise, the most complete dataset for emission data come from “Our World in Data”.
My goal is to run a correlation check and a significance check, to see if I can disprove the null.
Step 1: Load in the NOAA and Our World in Data API’s
Step 2: Using the Year as the Primary key, merge the API output into a single Data frame (DF) using Pandas.
Step 3: Run a correlation analysis, with significance testing (Confidence Interval of .95), using Pearson’s R equation.
Step 4: Make the experiment publicly accessible.
Results
With R-values anywhere between .889 and .923, there is a very clear correlation between emissions and rising global temperatures. Additionally, with sub .05 P-values, you can safely control for other variables. Simply, we can reject the null hypothesis that Emissions have a significant correlation to changing earth temperatures.
| Emission | Correlation | Significance (P<.05) |
| Carbon Dioxide | Very High (r = .923) | Yes |
| Methane | Very High (r = .889) | Yes |
| Nitrous Dioxide | Very high (r = .880) | Yes |
Final Comments
You can visit the Streamlit Site here, if you’re interested in a more thorough dashboard, or want to track the results overtime.
Source
Ritchie, H., Rosado, P., & Roser, M. (2023). CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Web Services API (version 2) Documentation | Climate Data Online (CDO) | National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). (n.d.). Retrieved November 25, 2025, from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/webservices/v2
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