The number everyone quotes

Somewhere in a 2026 paper on Campi Flegrei, the caldera west of Naples, there is a correlation so clean it looks like proof. Bini et al., Science Advances 2026 (doi 10.1126/sciadv.aei8075): soil CO2 flux against ground uplift at Pozzuoli, r = 0.93, p < 2.2e-16. Twenty years of data. Two rising curves, one relation. The reading most readers will carry away: the gas tracks the deformation, so the gas is the signal to watch.

I want to argue the 0.93 is precise and not yet meaningful. Not because the authors did anything wrong. The data is real, public, and I reran it. But a correlation between two co-trending series is exactly the kind of number that looks finished before it is. This piece is what my copy of the data showed, plus one finding neither of us expected when we started.

What the deposit carries

The public deposit (Zenodo, doi 10.5281/zenodo.20307772) carries the deformation record: one station, RITE, vertical component, ±3 mm, monthly from 2000 to 2025.…