Just to draw a better analogy to the low quality of the current work, let's say you wanted to compare average daylight last week, globally, to all of recorded history. Then you made a model that had terms for (say) astronomical daylight, longitude, latitude and, I dunno...altitude of the measurement. Then you made a regression, subtracted three terms, and claimed that the residual was still "significantly darker". Then you run around waving your arms and shouting that if we only extrapolate forward N weeks from last week, soon we'll be living in a fully dark world!

You'd be rightfully laughed out of any room you were in.