99.999% Certainty That Global Warming is Human Caused

September 5, 2014

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September 5, 2014 – When I was doing consulting work in telecommunications the highest service level standard was 99.999% or five “9s” up time. That meant you would experience a drop in service of no more than 5 minutes over an entire year. Well the five “9s” standard can now be applied to anthropogenic global warming.

The latest study entitled, “A probabilistic analysis of human influence on recent record global mean temperature changes,” begins by stating in December 2013 we experienced “the 346th consecutive month where global land and ocean average surface temperature exceeded the 20th century monthly average, with February 1985 the last time mean temperature fell below this value.” And despite this since 2007 public acceptance of our responsibility for global warming has declined. The authors observed that public attitudes represented “a major stumbling block to effective adaptation action and risk management.” So they went about assessing “the link between observed climate changes and human activities.”

Their conclusions leave little doubt. They state:

“The results of our statistical analysis would suggest that it is highly likely (99.999 percent) that the 304 consecutive months of anomalously warm global temperatures to June 2010 is directly attributable to the accumulation of global greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The corollary is that it is extremely unlikely (0.001 percent) that the observed anomalous warming is not associated with anthropogenic GHG emissions. Solar radiation was found to be an insignificant contributor to global warming over the last century…”

They also look at the 11 periods between January 1950 and June 2010 when global temperatures declined and from their analysis concluded that based on climate studies over longer periods than the 60 years the global average would be 25 periods of declining temperatures. The fact there were only 11 further “reinforces the case in support of recent global warming due to human influence.”

As of July 2014 we experienced the 353rd consecutive month of global land and ocean average temperatures exceeding the average surface monthly temperature throughout the 20th century. That amounts to almost 30 years in which temperatures globally have not gone below average.

For anthropogenic climate change deniers who cling to the 0.001% scenario that we humans are not causally linked to rising global temperatures on both land and sea what’s it like to be perpetually living in the dark 5 minutes of each year with no telephone or Internet service? Because that’s effectively where climate change deniers are, shutting themselves out from scientific proof.

As of December 31, 2013 in a review of scientific literature published on climate change, 16,208 peer-reviewed articles appeared in journals of science, and of those 25 questioned or rejected the conclusion that global warming was partially or primarily human caused. That amounts to 0.15% of the literature. Compare that to the IPCC‘s recent declaration of 95% certainty that humans are the major contributing factor to climate change and you can see that rather than overstating the facts, the international committee has gone to great lengths to understate it.

Steven Harper, the Prime Minister in Canada, Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister of Australia, and the Republican members of the U.S. Congress, please take note. You are dead wrong on this subject! Dead wrong is not a good place to be and because of your inability to understand or accept the science you may end up taking all of humanity down a path that will lead to a worst scenario outcome. Mitigation and risk adaptation strategies must happen now so that we can minimize the impact over the next few centuries or longer.