Contrasting Global Consensus and Regional Evidence: Short-Term COTemperature Relationships in China (20202024)

The positive relationship between carbon dioxide (CO) emissions and global warming has long been established, forming a cornerstone of the IPCC scientific consensus. However, most studies focus on global and long-term perspectives, while short-term and regional variations remain underexplored. This paper analyzes daily CO emission data from Carbon Monitor and high-resolution monthly temperature data from the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center for China between 2020 and 2024. Using Pearson correlation, OLS regression with HAC errors, and seasonal adjustment (X-13-ARIMA-SEATS), we evaluate the COtemperature relationship at multiple time scales. Results show a weak and statistically insignificant negative correlation at the monthly level (r = -0.175, slope = -0.637C per Mt/day, p = 0.340). After deseasonalization and detrending, however, anomalies exhibit a stronger and statistically significant negative correlation (r = -0.463, slope = -0.180C per Mt/day, p < 0.001). These findings suggest that short-term negative correlations are driven by socio-economic adaptive behaviors such as heating and cooling demand, rather than contradicting the greenhouse effect. By contrasting the global long-term consensus with short-term Chinese evidence, this study highlights the scale dependence of COtemperature correlations and warns against the misinterpretation of short-term results.