Man-made climate change is here.

Climate change is a reality we can no longer ignore. We see the impacts in our everyday lives, from extreme superstorms, to heat waves, to massive wildfires and droughts. But climate denial, bankrolled by Dirty Energy companies and justified by pseudoscience, persists.

Reality Drop, inspired by Skeptical Science, is a library of science-based rebuttals to climate change deniers.

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Showing 3 myths:

• #46: It's cooling

  Deniers say: The temperature trend is going down, especially over the last 15 years.
  Science says: Temperatures go up and down from year to year, but the Earth is warming over the long run.
  Temperature records from around the world clearly show that the Earth has been warming since 1880. Those who argue it's cooling are either confusing cold weather with climate, or are referencing data that measure only short-term changes in global surface temperatures. Natural climate patterns like El Niño or La Niña can make the average global temperature fluctuate from year to year; that's why the lines on a global temperature graph zigzag. It also helps explain why short periods of cooling can occur within longer-term periods of warming. When scientists look at the big picture, though, a clear trend emerges: The world is warming. Temperature records from thermometers aside though, this reality is confirmed by the fact that ice sheets are shrinking, Arctic sea ice is declining, and the oceans are getting warmer.
• #50: We're heading into an ice age

  Deniers say: Ice ages come every 11,500 years. The last ice age was 11,500 years ago. Do the math.
  Science says: Global warming is happening now. An ice age may or may not happen in thousands of years.
  The world is warming because of carbon pollution from fossil fuels like oil and coal. Without those human activities, the world would actually be COOLING slightly. Does that mean we’d be heading into an ice age? Maybe … in the next couple thousand years or so. Ice ages are triggered by natural forces like volcanoes and changes in the Earth’s orbit and tilt. But because the concentration of carbon dioxide is so much higher now than any time in nearly 1 million years, ice sheets are shrinking instead of growing. We need to focus on solving the climate crisis unfolding today, rather than worrying about an ice age thousands of years from now.
• #91: An ice age was predicted in the 70s

  Deniers say: The same scientists that raise the alarm about global warming were predicting an ice age more than 30 years ago.
  Science says: The climate crisis is happening now. An ice age may or may not happen in thousands of years.
  The scientific evidence is clear: Climate change is happening now and human beings are to blame. In the 1960s and 70s, scientists knew that human activities were changing the Earth’s climate. But which factors would have a bigger effect? Global warming pollution, like carbon dioxide? Or pollution with a cooling effect, like the particles that make up haze? And would human activities override the natural factors that affect our planet’s climate? By the end of the 1970s, most scientists were coming to the conclusion that the world would indeed warm because of carbon pollution. This consensus grew even stronger over time: Today, 97% of climate scientists with Ph.D.s who are actively publishing in their field agree that humans are warming our climate.