New Study: 99.9999 Percent Chance Humans Are Causing Climate Change

A new study from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California says there can no longer be any doubt that humans are responsible for climate change. Technically, there is a tiny amount of doubt, but the scientists cite statistical analysis showing 99.9999 percent confidence that we’re to blame. This so-called “gold standard” is as close to a guarantee as you’ll get in scientific analysis.

Climate change deniers have gone through various stages of disinformation in an attempt to cast doubt on the scientific consensus. In past years, they denied that global temperatures were increasing at all. As the evidence for that became incontrovertible (the last four years have been the hottest on record), they’ve shifted tactics to claim global temperature increases are part of a natural cycle and have nothing to do with human activity.

Virtually all scientists agree that global warming is a direct result of human activity. As we take fossil fuels out of the ground to produce energy, that carbon ends up in the atmosphere where it bottles up heat. The team at LLNL looked at satellite data from the past 40 years to connect human activity to the increase in temperatures.

There are three major climate data sets used by researchers, and the new study evaluated all three. The team says the likelihood of human’s driving climate change has reached five sigma level, which means there’s only a one in a million chance the conclusion is wrong. That’s the same statistical standard used to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

Based on the historical data, two of the three climate data sets reached five sigma certainty in 2005, and the third more conservative data set hit that level in 2016. Therefore, any alternative explanations for climate change have gotten considerably less likely in the past few decades. The new paper doesn’t pull any punches with its conclusion, warning that “Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals.”

Currently, about 62 percent of Americans accept that climate change is linked to human actions. That’s lower than other countries but higher than US polls in years past. As recently as 2013, only 47 percent of Americans believed humans were responsible for global warming. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in 2013 that humans were the likely cause of global warming with a 95 percent probability. A new IPCC report is due in 2021, which may recommend major changes in policy based on the LLNL study.

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