The evidence that mankind is driving changes in global climate is even stronger now than it was when the IPCC put out its last major report, says a newly published review.

A team of scientists from the UK, Canada, Australia and South Africa reviewed the advances in science since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report (IPCC AR4) came out in 2007. Their conclusion, published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is that “there is an increasingly remote possibility that climate change is dominated by natural rather than anthropogenic factors”.

The review notes that, since the 2007 IPCC report, warming is now attributable to human activities over Antarctica and is also discernible in reductions in Arctic sea ice and changes in ocean salinity.

“Recent advances in observational data and the way it is analysed give us a better insight into the climate system than ever before,” says paper author Peter Stott, of the UK’s Met Office (press release).

“This has allowed us to identify changes in our climate and disentangle natural variability from the results. The science reveals a consistent picture of global change that clearly bears the fingerprint of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”

In some quarters this paper is being presented as a ‘fightback’ by the climate scientists, although Stott told the Guardian it was originally drafted a year ago.

A special prize goes to the Telegraph for its coverage. In a story about an analysis of a huge amount of published evidence, detailing the “many advances” in science that demonstrate climate change is driven by human activity, the paper manages to quote climate skeptic European politician Godfrey Bloom saying, “I have seen no published evidence that goes beyond a rather unlikely hypothesis that man caused global warming and it is getting thinner by the day.”