You may recall Dana Nuccitelli's article from the end of last year about a study analyzing the risk of betting against global warming. Or, perhaps you've recently heard about the denier who is feeling “a bit stupid” for putting his money on temperatures cooling from 2008 to 2015.
Well, thanks to a new peer-reviewed study in Nature’s Scientific Reports, we can now pin down the odds that the global warming observed to date has been just a fluke of natural variability. The study, which co-author Dr. Michael Mann describes in an article on Live Science, takes a sophisticated look at the string of warm years post-2000. Using the most robust temperature measurements (which are those in the Northern Hemisphere), Mann and his colleagues find that in the absence of some sort of forcing (like fossil-fuel consumption adding GHGs to the atmosphere), the odds of 14 of the 16 warmest years in the 136-year record all occurring since 2000 are one in 300,000. When they included man-made forcings, the odds jump to 76 percent.
To some, this one in 300,000 probability may actually sound a little low, particularly if you have a great memory for these things. As Mann explains in his article, past estimates like these made many assumptions due to the complexity of the climate system and also simplified the analysis to be able to comment on emerging stories—like the record heat in 2014 and 2015—while the news was hot. One of the major assumptions of past analyses was that each year is unique, or not connected to surrounding years. Of course, we know this not to be the case, with large-scale climate features like El Niño influencing climate conditions across several years. Mann's study, by contrast, delves deep into the science and accounts for the many layers of complexity, thereby leading to a more accurate probability estimate.
The takeaway is the same in either case and is much less complicated than the science: unless you like feeling “a bit stupid” and enjoy losing money, don’t bet against warming. (Unless, of course, your denial earns you money…)
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