Gold Standard of Certainty Reached Regarding Humans’ Link to Climate Change
2019 marks the 40th anniversary of three major events in the climate science community: the release of the Charney report on carbon dioxide and climate change by the US National Academy of Sciences, the release of the Hasselman report which is “considered the first serious effort to provide a statistical framework for identifying a human-caused global warming signal,” and the beginning of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s use of satellites to monitor global changes in atmospheric temperatures.
Upon review and reanalysis of these events by a team of scientists, they concluded that the first two events reached a “five sigma” level of certainty, or what is also known as the “gold standard” level of certainty in scientific evidence. “Here it means there is a 1-in-a-million chance that ongoing climate change is being caused by anything other than humans, or that we’re 99.99 percent sure it’s us,” Katy Evans writes.
While there are still those who will deny that climate change is real, not to mention that there is a direct link to human causality, “97 percent of climate scientists all agree that the thousands of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, and reports form decades’ worth of data all show the same thing: It’s us.”
