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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• #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.