Climate change is real and increasingly a part of our daily lives. New research and studies out in just the past six months highlight the latest facts about the human-caused shift to our global weather systems and its effects on our planet.
First among them, there’s no longer any question that rising temperatures and increasingly chaotic weather are the work of humanity. There’s a 99.9999% chance that humans are the cause of global warming, a February study reported. That means we’ve reached the “gold standard” for certainty, a statistical measure typically used in particle physics.
The mechanism is well understood and has been for decades. Humans burn fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas, which release carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and other gases into the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. CO2 is the greenhouse gas that’s most responsible for warming.
More: Life after solving climate change: Not mud huts and gruel but clean air and warm homes
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Study lead author Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, told Reuters that “the narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong.”
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