Evidence of Man-Made Climate Change Passes "Gold Standard"

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While it's difficult to find people who are not 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 define the state of the world.

As if there were some reason to doubt the 97% of climate scientists who believe that climate change is now. The fact that the five most recent years have been warmed up in 139 years, the fact that the global temperatures have risen by 0.8 ° C since 1880, and the fact that the ocean 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 Livermore National Laboratory and colleagues. The article, published in Nature Climate ChangeThe dataset for the study of satellite data is used in the study of satellite data and is used in the study of satellite applications. (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 at 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 of this change has been surpassed by 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. Sigma refers to a standard deviation-a measurement of how to spread a given value from the mean or average. Another way of thinking about it is that it is a reality that it is a fact of observation.

Generally, the five-sigma level, or five standard deviations, is used in particle physics as the threshold before a discovery can be declared. Because many observations from particle physics can occur by chance rather than, say, a newly discovered type of particle, physicists tend to set the bar high. When an observation meets the five-sigma level, it was only 3.5 million times that chance could be observed. This threshold was used to declare the discovery of the Higgs boson and the first detection of gravitational waves.

Now, lead author Santer claims that the three biggest datasets on climate change show that human-driven climate change has reached the five-sigma level. . "The narrative out there that scientists do not know the cause of climate change is wrong," said Santer in an interview with Reuters. "We do."

The RSS (red) and STAR (blue) datasets showed that the evidence for human-driven climate change has been passed down but then the UAH (green) dataset only passed this threshold recently. (Santer et al., 2019)

This graph depicts the signal-to-noise ratio found in the three datasets over time. The signal refers to the human-driven climate change, while the noise refers to the general variance in our climate.

Making use of 40 years of satellite data

Klaus Hasselmann's Santer and colleagues' work on climate change. Hasselmann's original work was developed in 1979, but only a year after the first satellites. By modifying Hasselmann's approach and applying it to the 40 years of satellite data, Santer and colleagues could track the growing likelihood of human-driven climate change.

Because of variations in satellite instrumentation, condition, and configuration, not all three datasets showed the same level of confidence in human-driven climate change. As Santer writes, "In two out of three datasets, fingerprint detection at a 5σ [five-sigma] threshold-the gold standard for discoveries in particle physics-occurs no later than 2005, only 27 years after the 1979 start of the satellite measurements. "In 2016, the third dataset of the UAH satellite also showed that the fingerprint of human activity in climate In the conclusion of his article, Santer summarized these findings as succinctly as possible: "Humanity can not afford to ignore such clear signals."