Climate change: Scientists now 95 percent certain we are mostly to blame – CSMonitor.com.
A few key points from the piece:
Certainty over the human role has increase from “very likely” to “extremely likely,” a verbal shift representing 90 percent certainly in 2007 to 95 percent for this round of reports.
Another factor that should be kept in mind is the caution climate scientists typically have when reporting their findings. It should always be noted and those of us who aren’t climate scientists should realize the findings they do release are more scrutinized than we probably think:
For instance, when the first working group’s volume was released in 2007, researchers criticized it for failing to include in its sea-level projections the contributions from melting ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland. The working group didn’t include those because they weren’t well understood. Yet research published after the deadline for that report indicated that the melting appeared to be increasing.
And one last point of interest relating to the sun and ongoing research:
Solar physicists have been looking at trends in sun-spot behavior and characteristics over the past decade and have raised the possibility that when the current sun-spot cycle peaks in the next few months, the sun could enter an unusually long period where it generates few, if any sunspots.
Some climate scientists have looked at the potential impact of such an event and concluded that it likely would delay additional global warming – but only until the sun returned to more-normal swings in sun-spot activity.
