Is Climate Change causing the recent streak of record-setting warm years?

We're on a roll. 2015 was the hottest year on record, just like 2014 was the hottest year on record, and before that, 2012 was the hottest year on record... In fact, 15 of the 16 hottest years on record have happened in the last 15 years. What are the odds? In a paper released in Scientific Reports, researchers found that the odds of a string of record-setting years like this are very slim, somewhere between 1 in 5,000 and 1 in 170,000. And that's after taking into account natural variations in the climate cycle, like El Niño, La Niña and warming due to volcanic eruptions. Earlier predictions overstated the improbability of the record-setting streak, setting the likelihood of our current streak somewhere between 1 in 27 million and 1 in 650 million, worse odds than your chances of winning the Powerball (1 in 292 million). But those calculations assumed that each year was completely independent of the years around it, something that doesn't make sense in the real world. Put another way, the chances of our record-setting streak happening is somewhere between 600 and 130,000 times more likely to happen with human-caused climate change than without it. Those odds are too big to ignore. Read the full article at Polular Science
Source: Popular Science
Tue 26 Jan 2016 at 09:11