"Gold Standard" Reached In Identifying Man's Role In Climate Change

Scientists writing in the Nature Climate Change journal said Monday that the evidence that global warming is the result of man-made activity is irrefutable, and that signals from satellite measurements over 40 years indicating that conclusion have reached a "gold standard" level of certainty:

"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.'

Mainstream scientists say the burning of fossil fuels is causing more floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels. " (our emphasis)

As we noted yesterday in "Monday Reading," the fossil fuel-bankrolled Rethuglican party, along with its supreme leader, buffoon and malignant narcissist Donald "Rump" Trump has decided to collect a group of climate denying shills in an ad hoc group to try to undermine climate science, according to the Washington Post:

"The White House plans to create an ad hoc group of select federal scientists to reassess the government’s analysis of climate science and counter conclusions that the continued burning of fossil fuels is harming the planet, according to three senior administration officials.

The National Security Council initiative would include scientists who question the severity of climate impacts and the extent to which humans contribute to the problem, according to these individuals, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal deliberations." (our emphasis)

They might want to start out with the findings of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in their 2014 publication, "Climate Change: Evidence and Causes."  Or hundreds of other scholarly works over the past 30 years that conclude that man's burning of fossil fuels is causing the earth's climate to warm. But they won't be reading them because this is just another Rump exercise in deceit and delay which will impact us all, everywhere.