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A Historian's Perspective on Change and Consensus

Jack Hays

Jack Hays

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I thought this was excellent and worth sharing. A historian's perspective is useful to penetrate the confusion of climate claims and counterclaims.

History and the limits of the climate consensus

Posted on January 22, 2016 | 45 comments
by Judith Curry
Acknowledging the science of global warming does not require accepting that it is immune to criticism.
Continue reading →

I began my career as a historian of the century following 1660, an era of harsh climatic conditions that often affected political and cultural history. Some periods in particular, especially the years around 1680 and 1740, stand out as uniquely stressful. Extreme cold led to crop failures and revolts, social crises and apocalyptic movements, high mortality and epidemics, but it also spawned religious revivals and experimentation. If you write history without taking account of such extreme conditions, you are missing a lot of the story. That background gives me an unusual approach to current debates on climate change, and leads me to ask some questions for which I genuinely do not have answers.

I believe strongly in the supremacy of scientific method: science is what scientists do, and if they don’t do it, it’s not real science. Based on that principle, I take very seriously the broad consensus among qualified scientific experts that the world’s temperature is in a serious upward trend, which will have major consequences for most people on the planet—rising sea levels and desertification are two of the obvious impacts. In many religious traditions, activists see campaigns to stem these trends as a moral and theological necessity. Personally, I love the idea of using advanced technology to drive a decisive shift towards renewable energy sources, creating abundant new jobs in the process.



Speaking as a historian, though, I have some problems with defining the limits of our climate consensus, and how these issues are reported in popular media and political debate. . . . .


 
Jack Hays said:
I thought this was excellent and worth sharing. A historian's perspective is useful to penetrate the confusion of climate claims and counterclaims.

History and the limits of the climate consensus

Posted on January 22, 2016 | 45 comments
by Judith Curry
Acknowledging the science of global warming does not require accepting that it is immune to criticism.
Continue reading →

I began my career as a historian of the century following 1660, an era of harsh climatic conditions that often affected political and cultural history. Some periods in particular, especially the years around 1680 and 1740, stand out as uniquely stressful. Extreme cold led to crop failures and revolts, social crises and apocalyptic movements, high mortality and epidemics, but it also spawned religious revivals and experimentation. If you write history without taking account of such extreme conditions, you are missing a lot of the story. That background gives me an unusual approach to current debates on climate change, and leads me to ask some questions for which I genuinely do not have answers.

I believe strongly in the supremacy of scientific method: science is what scientists do, and if they don’t do it, it’s not real science. Based on that principle, I take very seriously the broad consensus among qualified scientific experts that the world’s temperature is in a serious upward trend, which will have major consequences for most people on the planet—rising sea levels and desertification are two of the obvious impacts. In many religious traditions, activists see campaigns to stem these trends as a moral and theological necessity. Personally, I love the idea of using advanced technology to drive a decisive shift towards renewable energy sources, creating abundant new jobs in the process.



Speaking as a historian, though, I have some problems with defining the limits of our climate consensus, and how these issues are reported in popular media and political debate. . . . .
Click to expand...

Thanks for an exceptional link! :thumbs: I always enjoy reading anything written by J Curry, and the fact that she is a climate historian is an added plus, IMO! Her arguments are sound and they do make sense; when she does disagree , she doesn't do it in a snarky insulting way, but uses questioning to make her point; she's always interesting; and she writes in a way that the average non-scientific reader can more easily understand what the entire debate is all about! In short, she has CLASS as well as knowledge! What's not to like? :mrgreen:
 
polgara said:
Thanks for an exceptional link! :thumbs: I always enjoy reading anything written by J Curry, and the fact that she is a climate historian is an added plus, IMO! Her arguments are sound and they do make sense; when she does disagree , she doesn't do it in a snarky insulting way, but uses questioning to make her point; she's always interesting; and she writes in a way that the average non-scientific reader can more easily understand what the entire debate is all about! In short, she has CLASS as well as knowledge! What's not to like? :mrgreen:
Click to expand...

You are most welcome, Polgara.:mrgreen:

Actually, Professor Curry is here presenting an essay by Philip Jenkins.
 
Jack Hays said:
I thought this was excellent and worth sharing. A historian's perspective is useful to penetrate the confusion of climate claims and counterclaims.

History and the limits of the climate consensus

Posted on January 22, 2016 | 45 comments
by Judith Curry
Acknowledging the science of global warming does not require accepting that it is immune to criticism.
Continue reading →

I began my career as a historian of the century following 1660, an era of harsh climatic conditions that often affected political and cultural history. Some periods in particular, especially the years around 1680 and 1740, stand out as uniquely stressful. Extreme cold led to crop failures and revolts, social crises and apocalyptic movements, high mortality and epidemics, but it also spawned religious revivals and experimentation. If you write history without taking account of such extreme conditions, you are missing a lot of the story. That background gives me an unusual approach to current debates on climate change, and leads me to ask some questions for which I genuinely do not have answers.

I believe strongly in the supremacy of scientific method: science is what scientists do, and if they don’t do it, it’s not real science. Based on that principle, I take very seriously the broad consensus among qualified scientific experts that the world’s temperature is in a serious upward trend, which will have major consequences for most people on the planet—rising sea levels and desertification are two of the obvious impacts. In many religious traditions, activists see campaigns to stem these trends as a moral and theological necessity. Personally, I love the idea of using advanced technology to drive a decisive shift towards renewable energy sources, creating abundant new jobs in the process.



Speaking as a historian, though, I have some problems with defining the limits of our climate consensus, and how these issues are reported in popular media and political debate. . . . .
Click to expand...

I see one part of her quote above: "I believe strongly in the supremacy of scientific method: science is what scientists do, and if they don’t do it, it’s not real science. Based on that principle, I take very seriously the broad consensus among qualified scientific experts that the world’s temperature is in a serious upward trend, which will have major consequences for most people on the planet—rising sea levels and desertification are two of the obvious impacts."

And then I see her follow through with the obvious strawman attack concerning "limits of our climate consensus" and continues on to the media and politics.

Riiiiight. In other words, she's pretending to take the world's scientific community seriously, and then tries to say why they shouldn't be taken seriously.

If she truly believed in the scientific method, she'd have a clue that when the great majority of the world's scientists, and the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, are saying that AGW is very real and needs to be addressed NOW, she wouldn't make that follow-on sentence at all.

Jack, as time goes on, as the caps continue to melt away, as the seas continue to warm, as the atmosphere continues to hold more and more water vapor...as we continue to see obvious physical evidence that YEAH, the planet's warming (and is doing so VERY fast in geological terms), how long are you going to hold on to this fantasy that the world's scientific community doesn't know what the hell it's talking about?
 
Glen Contrarian said:
I see one part of her quote above: "I believe strongly in the supremacy of scientific method: science is what scientists do, and if they don’t do it, it’s not real science. Based on that principle, I take very seriously the broad consensus among qualified scientific experts that the world’s temperature is in a serious upward trend, which will have major consequences for most people on the planet—rising sea levels and desertification are two of the obvious impacts."

And then I see her follow through with the obvious strawman attack concerning "limits of our climate consensus" and continues on to the media and politics.

Riiiiight. In other words, she's pretending to take the world's scientific community seriously, and then tries to say why they shouldn't be taken seriously.

If she truly believed in the scientific method, she'd have a clue that when the great majority of the world's scientists, and the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, are saying that AGW is very real and needs to be addressed NOW, she wouldn't make that follow-on sentence at all.

Jack, as time goes on, as the caps continue to melt away, as the seas continue to warm, as the atmosphere continues to hold more and more water vapor...as we continue to see obvious physical evidence that YEAH, the planet's warming (and is doing so VERY fast in geological terms), how long are you going to hold on to this fantasy that the world's scientific community doesn't know what the hell it's talking about?
Click to expand...

Before anything else, please note that Professor Curry is not the author (as she clearly explains). The author is historian Philip Jenkins.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
I see one part of her quote above:
If she truly believed in the scientific method, she'd have a clue that when the great majority of the world's scientists, and the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, are saying that AGW is very real and needs to be addressed NOW, she wouldn't make that follow-on sentence at all.
Click to expand...

From further down in the essay:

". . . That also gets us into areas of expertise. Climate and atmospheric scientists are not only convinced that the present warming trend is happening, but that it is catastrophic and unprecedented. That belief causes some bemusement to historians and archaeologists, who are very well used to quite dramatic climate changes through history, notably the Medieval Warm Period and the succeeding Little Ice Age. That latter era, which prevailed from the 14th century through the 19th, is a well-studied and universally acknowledged fact, and its traumatic effects are often cited. The opening years of that era, in the early-mid 14th century, included some of the worst social disasters and famines in post-Roman Europe, which were in turn followed by the massacre and persecution of dissidents and minorities—Jews in Europe, Christians in the Middle East, heretics and witches in many parts of the world. A cold and hungry world needed scapegoats.

Contemporary scientists tend to dismiss or underplay these past climate cycles, suggesting for instance that the medieval warm period was confined to Europe. Historians, in their turn, are deeply suspicious, and the evidence they cite is hard to dismiss. Do note also that the very substantial Little Ice Age literature certainly does not stem from cranky “climate deniers,” but is absolutely mainstream among historians. Are we seeing a situation where some “qualified and credentialed scientific experts” stand head to head with the “qualified and credentialed social scientific experts” known as historians? . . . "
 
Jack Hays said:
I thought this was excellent and worth sharing. A historian's perspective is useful to penetrate the confusion of climate claims and counterclaims.

History and the limits of the climate consensus

Posted on January 22, 2016 | 45 comments
by Judith Curry
Acknowledging the science of global warming does not require accepting that it is immune to criticism.
Continue reading →

I began my career as a historian of the century following 1660, an era of harsh climatic conditions that often affected political and cultural history. Some periods in particular, especially the years around 1680 and 1740, stand out as uniquely stressful. Extreme cold led to crop failures and revolts, social crises and apocalyptic movements, high mortality and epidemics, but it also spawned religious revivals and experimentation. If you write history without taking account of such extreme conditions, you are missing a lot of the story. That background gives me an unusual approach to current debates on climate change, and leads me to ask some questions for which I genuinely do not have answers.

I believe strongly in the supremacy of scientific method: science is what scientists do, and if they don’t do it, it’s not real science. Based on that principle, I take very seriously the broad consensus among qualified scientific experts that the world’s temperature is in a serious upward trend, which will have major consequences for most people on the planet—rising sea levels and desertification are two of the obvious impacts. In many religious traditions, activists see campaigns to stem these trends as a moral and theological necessity. Personally, I love the idea of using advanced technology to drive a decisive shift towards renewable energy sources, creating abundant new jobs in the process.



Speaking as a historian, though, I have some problems with defining the limits of our climate consensus, and how these issues are reported in popular media and political debate. . . . .
Click to expand...



Great find!

I have always contended that history offered too many questions to take man made global warming as a given.
 
Jack Hays said:
You are most welcome, Polgara.:mrgreen:

Actually, Professor Curry is here presenting an essay by Philip Jenkins.
Click to expand...

You are such a stickler for details! :slapme: As info only, Polgara has just signed up for a remedial reading class in the hope that improvements will be seen shortly, since Curry was quite clear in giving credit to Jenkins. In the meantime, she will attribute her red face to the cold climate she lives in. :lamo:
 
Jack Hays said:
From further down in the essay:

". . . That also gets us into areas of expertise. Climate and atmospheric scientists are not only convinced that the present warming trend is happening, but that it is catastrophic and unprecedented. That belief causes some bemusement to historians and archaeologists, who are very well used to quite dramatic climate changes through history, notably the Medieval Warm Period and the succeeding Little Ice Age. That latter era, which prevailed from the 14th century through the 19th, is a well-studied and universally acknowledged fact, and its traumatic effects are often cited. The opening years of that era, in the early-mid 14th century, included some of the worst social disasters and famines in post-Roman Europe, which were in turn followed by the massacre and persecution of dissidents and minorities—Jews in Europe, Christians in the Middle East, heretics and witches in many parts of the world. A cold and hungry world needed scapegoats.

Contemporary scientists tend to dismiss or underplay these past climate cycles, suggesting for instance that the medieval warm period was confined to Europe. Historians, in their turn, are deeply suspicious, and the evidence they cite is hard to dismiss. Do note also that the very substantial Little Ice Age literature certainly does not stem from cranky “climate deniers,” but is absolutely mainstream among historians. Are we seeing a situation where some “qualified and credentialed scientific experts” stand head to head with the “qualified and credentialed social scientific experts” known as historians? . . . "
Click to expand...

The problem is, Jack, she's making the classic error of assigning causation to correlation, in that she's effectively claiming that if the climate changed before due to natural causes, then the current (very rapid) change in our climate therefore MUST be natural and thus not due to the effects of worldwide human civilization. If she really believed in the scientific method, she'd know better than to make such a simplistic assumption.

What's more, she's being disingenuous in that she's claiming that the scientific community's stance that "the present warming thread is...catastrophic and unprecedented" is false. Why? Because the scientific community's stance is NOT that present warming trends haven't happened before, but that it's never happened before so quickly without there being an obvious external factor driving the warming trend. Today, there is only ONE identifiable factor that fits - and it's worldwide human civilization.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
The problem is, Jack, she's making the classic error of assigning causation to correlation, in that she's effectively claiming that if the climate changed before due to natural causes, then the current (very rapid) change in our climate therefore MUST be natural and thus not due to the effects of worldwide human civilization. If she really believed in the scientific method, she'd know better than to make such a simplistic assumption.

What's more, she's being disingenuous in that she's claiming that the scientific community's stance that "the present warming thread is...catastrophic and unprecedented" is false. Why? Because the scientific community's stance is NOT that present warming trends haven't happened before, but that it's never happened before so quickly without there being an obvious external factor driving the warming trend. Today, there is only ONE identifiable factor that fits - and it's worldwide human civilization.
Click to expand...

For the second time, "she" is not making any argument at all.
 
Jack Hays said:
Before anything else, please note that Professor Curry is not the author (as she clearly explains). The author is historian Philip Jenkins.
Click to expand...

A climate denier is a climate denier is a climate denier. Doesn't matter. What does matter is that y'all have decided to ignore the warnings of the worldwide scientific community despite the overabundance of physical evidence of the effects of AGW.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
The problem is, Jack, she's making the classic error of assigning causation to correlation, in that she's effectively claiming that if the climate changed before due to natural causes, then the current (very rapid) change in our climate therefore MUST be natural and thus not due to the effects of worldwide human civilization. If she really believed in the scientific method, she'd know better than to make such a simplistic assumption.

What's more, she's being disingenuous in that she's claiming that the scientific community's stance that "the present warming thread is...catastrophic and unprecedented" is false. Why? Because the scientific community's stance is NOT that present warming trends haven't happened before, but that it's never happened before so quickly without there being an obvious external factor driving the warming trend. Today, there is only ONE identifiable factor that fits - and it's worldwide human civilization.
Click to expand...

Neither of your paragraphs is accurate as to what is claimed or what is argued.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
A climate denier is a climate denier is a climate denier. Doesn't matter. What does matter is that y'all have decided to ignore the warnings of the worldwide scientific community despite the overabundance of physical evidence of the effects of AGW.
Click to expand...

Inaccuracy is inaccuracy is inaccuracy. The essay is not about belief or denial. It is about a historian's perspective.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
The problem is, Jack, she's making the classic error of assigning causation to correlation, in that she's effectively claiming that if the climate changed before due to natural causes, then the current (very rapid) change in our climate therefore MUST be natural and thus not due to the effects of worldwide human civilization. If she really believed in the scientific method, she'd know better than to make such a simplistic assumption.

What's more, she's being disingenuous in that she's claiming that the scientific community's stance that "the present warming thread is...catastrophic and unprecedented" is false. Why? Because the scientific community's stance is NOT that present warming trends haven't happened before, but that it's never happened before so quickly without there being an obvious external factor driving the warming trend. Today, there is only ONE identifiable factor that fits - and it's worldwide human civilization.
Click to expand...




I am sorry, but she is NOT making any such case and she IS following scientific principles. She is asking 'what was the cause' of previous warmings, plural, if we are to accept that man's generation of CO2 and onlyman's generation of CO2 can be held responsible now. You cannot have certainty, and surely not the absolute certainty of the warmist guild without addressing the issue of possible other causes.

Which, btw, is why I went from believer to 'questioner' as the absolutely certainty happened immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall and when activists found the warming religion as the new cause celeb
 
Glen Contrarian said:
A climate denier is a climate denier is a climate denier. Doesn't matter. What does matter is that y'all have decided to ignore the warnings of the worldwide scientific community despite the overabundance of physical evidence of the effects of AGW.
Click to expand...



You lose.

It is no longer anywhere near a scientific discussion when you call names. "Denier" was and is hurled like a curse word, but it must be noted that "denier" gets its root in religion, particularly the pagan faith of the middle Roman era.

In so stooping, by using questionable epithets, you reduce the debate to voodooism.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
I see one part of her quote above: "I believe strongly in the supremacy of scientific method: science is what scientists do, and if they don’t do it, it’s not real science. Based on that principle, I take very seriously the broad consensus among qualified scientific experts that the world’s temperature is in a serious upward trend, which will have major consequences for most people on the planet—rising sea levels and desertification are two of the obvious impacts."

And then I see her follow through with the obvious strawman attack concerning "limits of our climate consensus" and continues on to the media and politics.

Riiiiight. In other words, she's pretending to take the world's scientific community seriously, and then tries to say why they shouldn't be taken seriously.

If she truly believed in the scientific method, she'd have a clue that when the great majority of the world's scientists, and the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, are saying that AGW is very real and needs to be addressed NOW, she wouldn't make that follow-on sentence at all.

Jack, as time goes on, as the caps continue to melt away, as the seas continue to warm, as the atmosphere continues to hold more and more water vapor...as we continue to see obvious physical evidence that YEAH, the planet's warming (and is doing so VERY fast in geological terms), how long are you going to hold on to this fantasy that the world's scientific community doesn't know what the hell it's talking about?
Click to expand...

So you've got to appeal to authority. Curry is an authority. She's a scientist and understands climate science far better than 99.9% of the warmist activists out there. Her criticisms of climate science are quite reasonable and mainly have to do with the fact that uncertainties in prediction of future climate are fairly large, and this limitation of the science isn't appreciated by most fans of global warming. She is in agreement on this with the first working group's report in the IPCC's report, which doesn't say what a lot of people think it says. In short, climate sensitivity is likely to be a lot lower than activists think it will be. In addition, Curry is interested in the effect of natural variation on the climate record, which is a lot larger than is generally appreciated.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
A climate denier is a climate denier is a climate denier. Doesn't matter. What does matter is that y'all have decided to ignore the warnings of the worldwide scientific community despite the overabundance of physical evidence of the effects of AGW.
Click to expand...

You did not do well at science at school did you.
 
Tim the plumber said:
You did not do well at science at school did you.
Click to expand...

Hm. I don't have an engineering degree, but I have twenty years experience as an Navy engineer, most of which was at the supervisory level. I don't have an advanced nursing degree, but I've taken care of medically-fragile children with trachs, g-tubes (and one j-tube), seizure disorders, low-functioning autism, spinal muscular atrophy, fetal alcohol sydrome, and fetal drug syndrome. I don't have a computer science degree (passed three years' worth in 18 months, and I've only got three more classes to take for the degree), but I received several awards back in the Navy for database programs that I wrote for engineering, administration, and security (that last of which was more capable and easier to use than what was commercially-available at the time). I don't have a teacher's certificate, but I've taught hundreds of classes in everything from engineering procedures to traffic safety to firefighting. I'm not a psychologist, but I've counseled hundreds of kids - well, they were adults, but to me they were kids - and I was very good indeed. I don't have a law enforcement degree, but I've been the military equivalent of the chief of police, chief investigator, and legal officer.

And I once very nearly lost my career because I embarrassed the officers by showing them that yes, the engine room was full of asbestos - I knew more about proper testing for asbestos than they did.

So...no, I'm not a scientist, but everything I listed above either required scientific literacy and knowledge, or required a scientific approach. The point is, I've done a heck of a lot of different things - if there's a thing I haven't done, I've probably done something like it or trained to do or to respond to that thing.

One more thing - do you see me making assumptions about what others have or have not done, or of their capabilities? No - or if I do, it's something I don't mean to do. Why? Because I don't want to make the mistake you just made, to assume that the other guy is somehow uneducated or otherwise unable to understand the world around him...because I know that every once in a while, there's someone who's been, done, and seen a lot more than I have.

Assume nothing...and learn to discern the ring of truth.
 
Quote Originally Posted by Glen Contrarian View Post
A climate denier is a climate denier is a climate denier. Doesn't matter. What does matter is that y'all have decided to ignore the warnings of the worldwide scientific community despite the overabundance of physical evidence of the effects of AGW.
Click to expand...
You did not do well at science at school did you.
Click to expand...
Glen Contrarian said:
Hm. I don't have an engineering degree, but I have twenty years experience as an Navy engineer, most of which was at the supervisory level. I don't have an advanced nursing degree, but I've taken care of medically-fragile children with trachs, g-tubes (and one j-tube), seizure disorders, low-functioning autism, spinal muscular atrophy, fetal alcohol sydrome, and fetal drug syndrome. I don't have a computer science degree (passed three years' worth in 18 months, and I've only got three more classes to take for the degree), but I received several awards back in the Navy for database programs that I wrote for engineering, administration, and security (that last of which was more capable and easier to use than what was commercially-available at the time). I don't have a teacher's certificate, but I've taught hundreds of classes in everything from engineering procedures to traffic safety to firefighting. I'm not a psychologist, but I've counseled hundreds of kids - well, they were adults, but to me they were kids - and I was very good indeed. I don't have a law enforcement degree, but I've been the military equivalent of the chief of police, chief investigator, and legal officer.

And I once very nearly lost my career because I embarrassed the officers by showing them that yes, the engine room was full of asbestos - I knew more about proper testing for asbestos than they did.

So...no, I'm not a scientist, but everything I listed above either required scientific literacy and knowledge, or required a scientific approach. The point is, I've done a heck of a lot of different things - if there's a thing I haven't done, I've probably done something like it or trained to do or to respond to that thing.

One more thing - do you see me making assumptions about what others have or have not done, or of their capabilities? No - or if I do, it's something I don't mean to do. Why? Because I don't want to make the mistake you just made, to assume that the other guy is somehow uneducated or otherwise unable to understand the world around him...because I know that every once in a while, there's someone who's been, done, and seen a lot more than I have.

Assume nothing...and learn to discern the ring of truth.
Click to expand...

OK. So why do you think that the world wide scientific community is predicting dire stuff from the present warming given that it has not warmed significantly since 1998 despite the higher than predicted CO2 output?

I mean why do you think that the scientists are actually predicting any sort of doom?

Whay do you think they are actually saying?
 
Tim the plumber said:
OK. So why do you think that the world wide scientific community is predicting dire stuff from the present warming given that it has not warmed significantly since 1998 despite the higher than predicted CO2 output?

I mean why do you think that the scientists are actually predicting any sort of doom?

Whay do you think they are actually saying?
Click to expand...

Some scientists today, are political, and tend to find ways to please the hand that feeds them. Like the Hockey Stick hoax.
 
Tim the plumber said:
OK. So why do you think that the world wide scientific community is predicting dire stuff from the present warming given that it has not warmed significantly since 1998 despite the higher than predicted CO2 output?

I mean why do you think that the scientists are actually predicting any sort of doom?
Click to expand...


They aren't but here is a good example of what the poliicians want you to believe with this extremely heavy handed 'scare the kiddies' public information film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDthR9RH0gw

Needless this government funded infomercial was light years from any sort published research or observed reality. As ever it was all about indoctrnating guilt and fear in order to control people. Thats why the politicians are always so keen on it because such control is power :(
 
Tim the plumber said:
OK. So why do you think that the world wide scientific community is predicting dire stuff from the present warming given that it has not warmed significantly since 1998 despite the higher than predicted CO2 output?

I mean why do you think that the scientists are actually predicting any sort of doom?

Whay do you think they are actually saying?
Click to expand...

You can (wrongly) point to the "pause" all you want...but I see the melting polar caps, the melting of the Greenland ice cap, and - when I'm on the street near my house - the retreating glaciers on Mt. Rainier. Look at the picture below - that's in the Swiss Alps in the dead of winter!

4672.jpg

And you're telling me there's no global warming????

The newest study out states, "New calculations shows there is just a 0.01% chance that recent run of global heat records could have happened due to natural climate variations" It further states:

Thirteen of the 15 hottest years in the 150-year-long record occurred between 2000-14 and the researchers found there is a just a 0.01% chance that this happened due to natural variations in the planet’s climate.

2015 was revealed to have smashed all earlier records on Wednesday, after the new study had been completed, meaning the odds that the record run of heat is a fluke are now even lower.

“Natural climate variations just can’t explain the observed recent global heat records, but manmade global warming can,” said Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and one of the research team.

He said the record heat brought substantial impacts: “It has led to unprecedented local heatwaves across the world, sadly resulting in loss of life and aggravating droughts and wildfires. The risk of heat extremes has been multiplied due to our interference with the Earth system, as our analysis shows.”

The UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed on Monday that the global average surface temperature in 2015 shattered all previous records and said 15 of the 16 hottest years on record have all occurred since 2000. “We have reached for the first time the threshold of 1C above pre-industrial temperatures. It is a sobering moment in the history of our planet,” said WMO secretary-general Petteri Taalas.

But this will not change your mind. Why? NOTHING will change your mind until it becomes politically expedient to do so. Once conservative pundits and leaders start to look at each other and say, "well, maybe global warming IS real", then and ONLY then will you start accepting what the overwhelming majority of the world's scientific community already knows. I just hope that by then it won't be too late.
 
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