<img class="styles__noscript__2rw2y" src="https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/gettyimages-499111864.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0" srcset="https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/gettyimages-499111864.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0 400w, https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/gettyimages-499111864.jpg?v=ap&w=980&h=551&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0 800w" > A new study finds humans were virtually the main cause of global warming since 1950, using an alternative statistical model. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

A new study says climate change is virtually all of our fault.

Scientists utilizing new statistical methods have calculated that most of the observed warming of the planet between 1951 to 2010 was attributable to "anthropogenic forcings" — i.e. manmade greenhouse gases with a "very limited contribution from natural forcings."

The report entitled, "A new statistical approach to climate change detection and attribution," published in the journal Climate Dynamics, has a cadre of climate variability researchers demonstrating an alternative to "linear regression" based statistical models. In the study, the researchers display a "symmetric treatment of the magnitude and the pattern of the response to each (global warming source);" they dealt with climate modelling uncertainty by "considering the responses simulated by a wide range of climate models."

Linear regression models use "expected response patterns," which the The Guardian 's Dana Nuccitelli describes as making the assumption that more warming will occur on land than over water.

In this particular statistical model, the scientists presume that temperatures that occurred from several individual forcings account for all of the influences of increased temperature. They conclude that the warming observed in the 60 year time period was "mostly related to anthropogenic forcings."

(MORE: Meteorologists Warming to Consensus That Climate Change is Human Caused)

Gavin Schmidt, NASA's chief climate scientist, told weather.com in an email that the study reiterated most of the key findings of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.

"This result is not really surprising, many methods have shown the same thing," Schmidt said. "The fact of the matter is that no matter how much internal variability you can come up with, or how much sensitivity to solar or volcanoes or other natural causes there is, you simply can't match what's happened in the real world in recent decades (and that doesn't just mean the global mean temperature, but also the ocean heating, and the stratospheric cooling, and the polar amplification etc.). The size of the excursion is roughly 5 sigma (or 5 standard deviations) and that, just as for the Higgs Boson discovery, makes it exponentially unlikely that the trends are not human in origin."

James Annan, a British climate prediction scientist, applauded the work of the researchers in finding an alternative climate modeling method.

"It is...useful to have a slightly different technique that generates consistent results to previous methods," Annan said in an email. "Basically, models which only include anthropogenic factors generally produce about the same warming as those that include natural and anthropogenic factors. The natural factors don't amount to very much at all. The old IPCC statement referring to 'most of the observed warming' was always a very conservative understatement, the scientific calculations have given values well over 50 percent for a very long time now."

Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford's Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department, also applauded the new climate model.

"It is sensible study from a highly regarded group of researchers, which represents an improvement (certainly in terms of clarity and coherence) on our treatment of one specific aspect of the climate change detection and attribution problem, namely uncertainty in the expected patterns of change we obtain from climate models," Myers noted. "And I'm saying that as one of the key authors of the method they are proposing to replace!"

Allen observed that the scientists' results concluding that most of the warming arising from human influence on climate — with natural factors contributing very little, or even a small net cooling — was consistent with "lots of other studies and with the conclusions of the most recent IPCC Assessment."

"While it is nice to see new methods developed that may well make a difference when applied to a broader range of variables, the evidence for human influence on global average surface temperatures is now so strong that you get pretty much the same answer whether you use the kind of least-squares fit you learned in high-school or the most sophisticated statistical methods available," he concluded.

MORE ON WEATHER.COM: Climate Change, Before And After