Report: Data Shows Humans are Causing Polar Warming

New data provides evidence that human activity is causing warming in both Antarctica and the Arctic, a team of scientists says. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, provides a link left missing last year, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the effects of human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases were apparent on all continents except Antarctica. A team of British, American, and Japanese researchers compiled surface-temperature measurements from Antarctica and the Arctic going back to 1900. They compared those readings to computer models with and without human activity. The actual results tracked the predictions of the human-based models but not the all-natural ones. While earlier studies had shown temperature rises at the earth’s poles, a lack of data and natural variability made it impossible to link them definitively with human influence.