Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard': scientists

OSLO (Reuters) - Evidence for man-made global warming has reached a “gold standard” level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in greenhouse gases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday.

“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals,” the U.S.-led team wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change of satellite measurements of rising temperatures over the past 40 years.

They said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a “five-sigma” level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming.

Such a “gold standard” was applied in 2012, for instance, to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe.

Benjamin Santer, lead author of Monday’s study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said he hoped the findings would win over skeptics and spur action.

“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” he told Reuters. “We do.”


Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-temperatures-idUSKCN1QE1ZU



Ocean water is pushed up by the bottom of a pinnacle iceberg as it falls back during a large calving event at the Helheim glacier near Tasiilaq, Greenland, June 22, 2018. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/File Photo