Theory 14/Land change attribution/Satellite archives
Change Is Attributable at Pixel Scale
The claim
Whether a land change is anthropogenic is set by the ratio of the change to the variability of the same pixel under climate alone, so attribution is a signal-to-noise problem at the pixel rather than a judgement at the region.
01Mechanism
Natural variability sets the background distribution; a change is attributable only when it exceeds that envelope.
02Prediction
Attributable change should track the per-pixel ratio.
03Refutation
Attribution tracking change magnitude alone would remove the baseline.
04What makes it checkable
Multi-decade, moderate-resolution archives now provide the per-pixel baseline needed to compute that envelope.
05Why it was not testable before
Baselines shorter than a decade could not separate trend from variability.