By Susan Milius
It’s not Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick. It’s human-driven climate change that is causing myriad disruptions — dwindling snowpacks and earlier salmon migrations and so on — in the Northern Hemisphere, says an international research team.
That link has been predicted but is hard to demonstrate scientifically, NASA’s Cynthia Rosenzweig says. Now she and 13 other environmental scientists say they have reviewed so much data on change and analyzed possible causes in such a way that the culprit’s fingerprints show up.
The team’s work demonstrates that there’s “a huge suite of impacts of warming now discernible,” says Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Global Ecology at StanfordUniversity. And globally these wide-ranging impacts can be “attributed with confidence” to the warming caused by humans. “In the body of evidence about climate change, this is a very important layer,” he says.