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:

• #35: It's a 1500-year cycle

  Deniers say: Climate goes through natural cycles. The warming we’re seeing now is just part of a 1,500-year cycle.
  Science says: Some natural cycles make it warmer in one part of the world and colder in another. Man-made climate change makes it warmer everywhere.
  From ice core data we can see that on approximately 1,500-year cycles, the northern polar region has warmed while the southern polar region has cooled. This "see-saw" effect redistributes the planet’s heat, but total heat in the global system stays the same. In other words, regional temperatures change, but the average global temperature doesn’t. These regional cycles are unlike what we’re observing now. The global temperature is rising because of carbon pollution from human activities. And there’s nothing natural about that.
• #36: The Little Ice Age just ended

  Deniers say: The last 150 years of warming is just a natural recovery from the last ice age.
  Science says: A planet doesn't "recover" from an ice age like we do from hypothermia. The Earth is warming up, and carbon pollution is to blame.
  The “Little Ice Age,” the most recent cool period in the Earth’s history, may have been triggered by decades of intense volcanic activity. Scientists generally agree that the Little Ice Age ended in the late 19th century. So, could the warming we’re seeing now simply be a “recovery” after the Little Ice Age? No. Although the climate goes through cycles, there isn’t a normal recovery point. In other words, warming after an ice age isn’t like a human naturally recovering from hypothermia. Something has to force the climate to get warmer. In the early part of the 20th century, the Earth warmed because of less volcanic activity and more solar activity. But most of the warming from the mid-20th century onward has been due to carbon pollution from dirty fuels. And now, the planet is warmer than at any point in the last 1,000 years … meaning it’s warmer than well before the start of the Little Ice Age.
• #69: Mt. Kilimanjaro's ice loss is due to land use

  Deniers say: Ice melting on Mount Kilimanjaro has local causes. So why should we believe in global climate change?
  Science says: It's not about one glacier or one mountain. Overall, glaciers are losing 150 billion tons of ice a year.
  Mount Kilimanjaro is losing snow and ice. Is this because of global warming? Maybe, but changes in local weather patterns might be more important. Conditions have become drier, meaning less snow is falling to replenish the glaciers and reflect sunlight. Researchers have found that deforestation of the mountain’s foothills is a significant contributor to this drying trend. Still, as one researcher of Kilimanjaro’s deforestation put it: “The fact that the loss of ice on Mt. Kilimanjaro cannot be used as proof of global warming does not mean that the Earth is not warming. There is ample and conclusive evidence that Earth's average temperature has increased in the past 100 years, and the decline of mid- and high-latitude glaciers is a major piece of evidence."