This is the new Reality Drop. No games, just truths.

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:

  • #41: It cooled mid-century

    Deniers say: From 1945 to 1975, the planet cooled. What happened to global warming?
    Science says: In the middle of the 20th century, the global climate cooled over the short term. Carbon dioxide pollution is warming our planet over the long term.
    Over the last 130 years, global temperatures have increased due to carbon pollution from the burning of dirty energy like oil and coal. It’s true though that around the middle of the last century, the temperature record shows a short-term cooling trend. Generally, the trend has been attributed to an increase in sulfur pollution, which rapidly forms tiny particles in the air known as "aerosols" that reflect incoming solar energy back into space. The surge in sulfur dioxide pollution was mostly due to industrial activities that picked up after World War II, as well as several volcanic eruptions in the early 1960s. We’ve come a long way since then to limit sulfur pollution, since it’s bad for our health and causes acid rain. Even today though, we still emit some. And even today, sulfur pollution is masking some of the warming caused by carbon pollution from dirty energy. None of this changes the fact that the Earth is steadily warming and carbon pollution is the primary cause.

  • #67: Glaciers are growing

    Deniers say: We can't ignore the glaciers that are advancing and gaining ice.
    Science says: A few glaciers are advancing. Most are shrinking. Overall, they are losing 150 billion tons of ice a year.
    Make no mistake: Globally, glaciers are shrinking, losing about 150 billion tons of ice a year. And while climate deniers may try to confuse the issue by “cherry picking” data or focusing on short-term variations, the long-term trend is crystal clear. Most of the glaciers worldwide are receding at an accelerating rate. Sure, there are isolated cases of glaciers that haven’t melted or are gaining ice. But as with any climate-related data, it’s important to stay focused on the big picture. If a conclusion isn’t based on large-scale, long-term trends, you’re not getting the whole story.

  • #110: The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report admits the planet is barely warming

    Deniers say: The planet isn’t warming, and even the IPCC now admits it.
    Science says: Global warming hasn’t stopped. It’s just slowing down over a speed bump, before it likely picks up speed again.
    Many indicators tell us the earth is still warming, and surface air temperature is just one of them.

    Surface air temperatures don’t rise or fall at constant rates. When you plot them on a graph, the rising line doesn’t look like a railing (straight), but more like the stairs themselves (with intermittent landings where things flatten out between steps and then go up again).

    The second important thing to remember is that real scientists don’t look at short periods of time to evaluate what is and isn’t happening to the planet. Why? Because when you arbitrarily pick start and end dates within 10 or even 20 years, there’s just not enough data to give an accurate picture and it’s easy to skew the results. That’s why scientists prefer to rely on sustained, long-term trends over several decades.

    It’s a fact that the first decade of the 21st century was the hottest decade on record. At the same time, the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report does note that between 1998—2012, temperatures rose at a slightly slower rate than the longer-term rate seen since the mid-20th century.

    Why? Scientists suggest it could be because oceans have absorbed a lot of the heat that would otherwise have stayed in the atmosphere.

    But can the oceans retain this absorbed heat forever? No.

    Other possible reasons for the slower rate of surface warming include temporary cooling influences like a solar minimum (a low point in the sun’s activity), and the effect of natural and man-made aerosols, which block some of the sun’s radiation from reaching the earth. With such cooling influences, the fact that we have NOT cooled in the last decade is actually a strong sign that global warming continues unabated.

    To sum up, global warming hasn’t stopped. It’s just going over a little speed bump!