The Telegraph reports:
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also said there was a 95 per cent likelihood that global warming is caused by human activities. That was the highest assessment so far from the IPCC, which put the figure at 90 per cent in a previous report in 2007, 66 per cent in 2001, and just over 50 per cent in 1995.
Reto Knutti, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said: “We have got quite a bit more certain that climate change is largely man-made. We’re less certain than many would hope about the local impacts.”
The IPCC report, the first of three in 2013 and 2014, will face intense scrutiny particularly after errors in the 2007 study, which wrongly predicted that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.
Even if the 95% number was calculated rather than voted on, it’s only 2-sigmas. The standard for real science is 5-sigmas or about 99.9999%. This IPCC report wouldn’t pass mustard in the particle physics community. A good way to differentiate between science and religion is to ask wether the behavior of a topologically mixing dynamic system that is sensitive to initial conditions can be predicted long into the future.
Linus will see the Great Pumpkin first….
Trying to appear that they are statistically proven to be right. Without the statistics. That has the opposite effect on those who would go by such a real statistical analysis while having minimal marginal positive effect on the 90% believers. And I think we’ll get a chance to discredit them rather convincingly in ways that will subtract a number of those that believe that the percentage figure means that they should believe 90% or 95% of the dogma.
But if it’s been cooling for 23 years, it’s gotta warm up some day! 😉