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:

• #3: Carbon dioxide isn’t the main cause of warming

  Deniers say: It's not just carbon dioxide. What about volcanoes, solar variations, methane, aerosols and clouds?
  Science says: Ask the majority of climate scientists: Man-made carbon pollution is the cause of the global warming we’re seeing now.
  Scientists know our climate is changing, primarily due to carbon pollution from the burning of dirty energy like oil and coal. It's true that other factors affect our climate, including other greenhouse gases such as methane. Solar variation, volcanoes and clouds all affect the climate, too. But scientists take all these factors into account and weigh the contributions that each one makes to our climate. When they do, it's clear that man-made carbon dioxide pollution is overwhelmingly responsible for the warming we’re experiencing now.
• #23: Other planets are warming

  Deniers say: It's not just the Earth that's warming — what about Mars?
  Science says: We don't know if other planets are warming. We know the Earth is — and it's our own fault.
  
It’s true that the sun affects the climates of the planets in our solar system — including our planet. If the sun’s energy significantly increased, we would expect most or all of the planets to warm up. But there’s no good evidence of consistent warming on planets other than Earth. And the variation that’s occurred in the sun’s energy over the course of the 20th century just isn’t significant enough to account for the large-scale climate change we’re seeing here. Multiple lines of evidence confirm that humans, not the sun, are the primary cause of the climate change that's happening here on Earth.
• #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.