Proof - if it was ever needed

From the subject of climate warming being the topic of the moment last year, this year it has seemingly been relegated to something akin to ho-humm news. It oughtn't to be, as the very critical issue of the survival of our planet as we know it should be forefront in our minds - and action!

the heraldscotland reports in "Fresh evidence global warming is man-made":

"Climate scientists hit back at the sceptics today with new research they say has uncovered the “fingerprint” of man-made global warming.

Researchers working like detectives investigating a crime compared real observational evidence with data from computer simulations to see how they matched up.

They concluded there was an “increasingly remote possibility” of human behaviour not being the chief driver of climate change.

The clues were unravelled using a forensic technique called “optimal detection” in which different factors – natural and human – were given equal consideration.

They covered a wide range of trends affecting land and sea temperature, the saltiness of the oceans, humidity, rainfall and Arctic sea ice.

Also included was warming in the Antarctic, which has more recently been attributed to human influence.

Dr Peter Stott, from the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, who co-led the study, said: “What we’ve shown in this paper is that the fingerprint of human influence has been detected in many different aspects of climate change.

“We’ve seen it in temperature and increases in atmospheric humidity, we’ve seen it in salinity changes ... we’ve seen it in reductions in Arctic sea ice and changing rainfall patterns.

“What we see here are observations consistent with a warming world. This wealth of evidence we have now shows there is an increasingly remote possibility of climate change being dominated by natural factors rather than human factors.”

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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