Published in Science - Abstract - The ongoing global glacier retreat is affecting human societies by
causing sea-level rise, changing seasonal water availability,
and increasing geohazards. Melting glaciers are
an icon of anthropogenic climate change. However, glacier response times
are
typically decades or longer, which implies that
the present-day glacier retreat is a mixed response to past and current
natural
climate variability and current anthropogenic
forcing. Here, we show that only 25 ± 35% of the global glacier mass
loss during
the period from 1851 to 2010 is attributable to
anthropogenic causes. Nevertheless, the anthropogenic signal is
detectable
with high confidence in glacier mass balance
observations during 1991 to 2010, and the anthropogenic fraction of
global glacier
mass loss during that period has increased to 69
± 24%.
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