Evidence that humans cause global warming has hit the “gold standard” level of confidence, a U.S.-led team of scientists reportedly wrote in a journal article published Monday.
“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals,” the scientists wrote in Nature Climate Change, according to Reuters, citing satellite measurements and rising temperatures over the past 40 years.
{mosads}The scientists said that confidence in their prediction that humanity is raising the temperature on earth has reached “five-sigma” level, meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that similar data would appear if there was no warming, the news service added.
This “gold standard” has previously been applied for major scientific discoveries, like that of the Higgs boson subatomic particle in 2012, Reuters noted.
Benjamin Santer, lead author of the study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, told the news service he hoped the findings would convince the last remaining skeptics.
“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” he said. “We do.”
There is a vast scientific consensus that humans have causes global warming.
In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put the probability of humans being the main cause of warming since the 1950s at 95 percent.