Man-made global warming hits ‘Gold standard’, now evident
Scientists revealed a few days ago that man-made global warming has reached a ‘Gold Standard’ and this is now backed up by certain evidence. This has added pressure to reduce greenhouse gases in order to limit the rise in global temperature. After evaluation of the satellite measurements of rising temperatures for the past 40 years, a US led team stated in the journal ‘Nature Climate Change’ that now humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals at all.
They further said that the human activities responsible for raising the temperature of earth has reached ‘five sigma’ level. This statistical measure means that there is mere one in a million chance that humans are not responsible for the rising global warming. The ‘Gold Standard’ was first applied in 2012 at discovery of Higgs Boson, a sub-atomic particle which is the basic building block of universe.
Benjamin Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says that it is totally a wrong narrative that scientists do not know the reasons for global warming. We do know the reason. Many mainstream scientists believe that the burning of fossil fuels has caused more floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels. And who is responsible for the burning of fossil fuels? It’s us. Humans.
US President Donald Trump has claimed doubts on the effects of climate change and promised to pull out of the Paris Agreement during his election campaign. He does not hold himself or his administration responsible for controlling climate change due to global warming. However, according to a poll in Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in 2018, 62% Americans believe that humans are the actual cause of climate change. This percentage was only 47% in 2013, and this increase is a big surprise.
Researchers in US, Canada and Scotland evaluated from the satellite data according to which two of three satellites in 2005 and the third one in 2016 revealed that global warming has reached ‘five sigma’ level.
Apart from scientists, United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also has the same agenda. In 2013, it concluded that it is extremely likely or at least 95% probable that human activities have been the main cause of global warming which resulted in climate change since 1950s.
According to Peter Scott, officer of British Met, it would not be wrong to be virtually certain that 99-100% cause of climate change is human activity. The other factors that contributed to climate change have gotten less dominating.
The last four years were the hottest years of 19th, 20th and 21st century. The IPCC will be publishing its next formal assessment of probabilities in 2021. Until then, let’s help reduce global warming.