Author: Matt Davis / Source: Big Think
- While it’s difficult to find people who deny climate change is happening, some still argue that humans are not climate change’s primary cause.
- By applying peer-reviewed statistical methods to 40 years’ worth of satellite data, researchers have determined that the evidence of human-driven climate change has passed the gold standard of scientific certainty: the five-sigma level.
- This threshold is used in particle physics to determine the existence of new particles; now, it’s being used to definitively state that humans are the cause of climate change.
As if there were any reason to doubt the 97% of climate scientists who believe that climate change is driven by human activities, now more data has confirmed what we already knew. The fact that the five most recent years have been the five warmest in 139 years, the fact that global temperatures have risen by 0.8°C since 1880, and the fact that arctic sea ice is decreasing by 12.8% per decade are definitively attributable to human-driven climate change.
The new certainty comes from a recent article by Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and colleagues. The article, published in Nature Climate Change, looked at three of the most relied-on satellite datasets used to conduct climate science: Specifically, the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), the Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR), and the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) datasets.
The researchers were looking through the datasets for a specific signal—that is, the “thumbprint” of human-induced climate change—in the noise of the data—the general variance in the climate. They found that the likelihood that the current change in climate is derived from human activities has surpassed the “gold standard” of statistical significance, or the five-sigma level.
Rigorous statistics
For most, the fact that the researchers detected the fingerprint of human-driven climate change at the five-sigma level probably means exactly nothing. Sigma refers to…
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