In his essay "How Do We Know that Human Activities Have Affected Global Climate?" — posted on Sigma Xi's blog on November 11, 2019 — Ben Santer explains the scientific research that produced the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conclusion that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate" and the subsequent research that confirmed and strengthened it. In 2013, he notes, the IPCC concluded, "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century."
A member of NCSE's board of directors and a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Santer was awarded the 2019 William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from Sigma Xi in recognition of his own scientific research on natural and human "fingerprints" in observed climate records, as well as his efforts to communicate climate change to a wide range of audiences. Santer will accept the award, and deliver a lecture, at Sigma Xi's annual meeting and student research conference in Madison, Wisconsin, November 14-17, 2019.
