Recent record temperature years ‘extremely unlikely’ without global warming, scientists say
Source: Washington Post
Recent record temperature years ‘extremely unlikely’ without global warming, scientists say
By Chelsea Harvey January 25 at 11:37 AM
Last week, U.S. agencies announced that the year 2015 had smashed records to become the hottest year ever recorded by humans, a finding that emphasizes the continued pattern of long-term global warming on Earth. The prior hottest year was just one year earlier — 2014 — and nine out of the 10 hottest years on global record have now occurred in the past decade.
The announcement of the 2014 temperature record was accompanied by a startling statistic. News media reported that the odds of this spate of record-breaking years happening due to natural variations only — that is, not as the result of human-caused climate change — came to as low as one in 650 million.
Now, a new paper out Monday in the journal Nature Scientific Reports conducts what the authors have described as a more rigorous calculation, concluding that the odds of this series of record-breakers — ending with 2014 — were not quite as low as reported. Even so, the calculations still make it clear that the string of record temperatures was highly unlikely to have occurred by chance alone, supporting the idea that human-caused climate change is the culprit.
“Individual record years and the observed runs of record-setting temperatures were extremely unlikely to have occurred in the absence of human-caused climate change,” the authors write.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/01/25/recent-record-temperature-years-extremely-unlikely-without-global-warming-scientists-say/
Related: The Likelihood of Recent Record Warmth (Nature Scientific Reports)
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