There are people who deny climate change altogether. Then there are people who claim that, yes, climate change exists, but humans are barely affecting it, because it would happen anyway.
Yeah, all of the aforementioned people are wrong, according to a brand new equation developed by scientists.
The Australian National University announced on Sunday that, according to recent research, humans are causing the climate to change a whopping 170 times faster than it would naturally. According to the researchers, evidence shows that greenhouse gas emission caused by humans over the past 45 years has affected temperatures at a rate that "dwarf[s] the natural background rate."
Said Will Steffen, a climate change expert and ANU professor, in a statement:
"Over the past 7,000 years the primary forces driving change have been astronomical — changes in solar intensity and subtle changes in orbital parameters, along with a few volcanoes. They have driven a rate of change of 0.01 degrees Celsius per century."
By comparison, humans have increased the rate of temperature rise to 1.7 degree Celsius per century.
Continued Steffen:
"We are not saying the astronomical forces of our solar system or geological processes have disappeared, but in terms of their impact in such a short period of time they are now negligible compared with our own influence. Crystallizing this evidence in the form of a simple equation gives the current situation a clarity that the wealth of data often dilutes. It also places the contemporary human impact in the context of the great forces of nature that have driven Earth system dynamics over billions of years."
So that's great.
