Humans must be to blame for climate change, say scientists

Humans must be to blame for climate change, say scientists

Climate scientists have delivered a powerful riposte to their sceptical critics with a study that strengthens the case for saying global warming is largely the result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.


The researchers found that no other possible natural phenomenon, such as volcanic eruptions or variations in the activity of the Sun, could explain the significant warming of the planet over the past half century as recorded on every continent including Antarctica.

It is only when the warming effect of emitting millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from human activity is considered that it is possible to explain why global average temperatures have risen so significantly since the middle of the 20th century.

The study updates a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has discovered several new elements of the global climate which have been influenced by humans, such as an increasing amount of water vapour evaporating from the warmer oceans into the atmosphere and a corresponding increase in the saltiness of the sea.

"There is an increasingly remote possibility that climate change is dominated by natural rather than anthropogenic [man-made] factors," the scientists concluded in their study, published in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews of Climate Change.

Compare/contrast with the recent South Dakota anti-science proposition in regards to climate change:

South Dakota may soon make climate-change denial the law of the land, if an effort underway in the state legislature is successful. Via Brad Johnson, we learn that the state House of Representatives recently passed a new law calling for "balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools of South Dakota."

The resolution, approved by a vote of 36-30, states that public schools should be required to teach students that "global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact" and that a variety of "climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics" could be changing the weather. Yes, that’s astrological, as in horoscopes. And as Brad Plumer points out, thermology involves the science of infrared body imaging. Not quite clear what role that might play in global warming.

The state Senate approved an amended version of the resolution that is slightly less kooky, dropping the "astrological" and "thermological" causes but still asserting that the "global warming debate" has "prejudiced the scientific investigation of global climatic change phenomena."


Now the House will decide whether to adopt the amended version. No matter which version they adopt, it looks like South Dakota could soon be the first state to sign climate change confusion into law.

Science is not democratic. Laws of nature don't get repealed. Regardless of how people may feel about the way the "message" of global climate change is packaged, or the identities of some the people who are front and center in educating about climate change (can people really deny all the science just because they don't like Al Gore?), or the vague feeling that by "believing in" the concept of man-facilitated climate change one is transformed into a tree-hugging, granola-eating hippie, the actual science is there. Skepticism has its place in weighing the value of scientific claims, but real skepticism means analyzing the available information with....um, the scientific method.