Scientists released the analysis of satellite temperature data in Nature Climate Change to mark 40 years of observations. Until satellites came about in the 1970s, scientists had to rely on weather balloons that provided sparse, imperfect data on what was going on in the atmosphere. The satellites were transformative, allowing scientists to improve models, validate past theories about climate change, and generally showing that human ingenuity is astounding. We can measure temperature from space!
To commemorate this achievement, the new study looked at three major satellite temperature datasets which were created using slightly different methods. They then used an analysis to tease out the signal of global warming from the noise of background variability, and charted its significance. For two of the datasets, they found the global warming signal emerged at the five sigma level in just 27 years. But by 40 years, even the most conservative dataset kept at the University of Alabama, Huntsville cleared the five sigma threshold. What that means in everyday language is that there’s a roughly 1-in-3.5 million chance that the warming we’ve seen is due to random chance.
“Five sigma is a big deal for physicists,” Ben Santer, the lead author of the study and climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told Earther. “It is the gold standard for discovery in physics. When the announcement was made for Higgs boson, that was the big deal and the detection of particle was at a sigma threshold. Crossing a five sigma ain’t no minor warming.”
The new paper puts a nail in the coffin of the tired satellite data argument. Which isn’t to say jabronis like Cruz will stop using it, but now it’s clear to the five sigma value just how bad faith the talking point is.
Complete story:
Evidence For Global Warming Passes Physics' Gold Standard
Second post:
Climate games
Reuters reports that a new analysis of temperature data has increased the level of certainty that humans are the main cause of global warming.
Evidence for man-made global warming has reached a “gold standard” level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in greenhouse gases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday.
They said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a “five-sigma” level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming.
Such a “gold standard” was applied in 2012, for instance, to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe.
Benjamin Santer, lead author of Monday’s study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said he hoped the findings would win over skeptics and spur action.
The confidence one can have that skeptics will be won over by this finding is a ten-sigma thing, about 1 in a gazillion chance. Dr. Santer, good soul that he is, needs to get his brains checked for anomalies, radiation leaks, photon eruptions, and other medical stuff. This will be used by climate change skeptics, a/k/a/ Russian Roulette players, as more evidence of a deep state conspiracy running false flag operations to destroy America and all that is good and decent.
B&B orig: 1st post 2/28/19; 2nd post 2/25/19
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