25 Myths and Bad Arguments About Climate Change | The Logic of Science

Global warming is arguably one of the most controversially topics among the general public. The overwhelming agreement that we are causing the climate to change, and that agreement is based on an extraordinary mountain of evidence. Nevertheless, given the amount of junk science on the internet, this disconnect between what people think and what scientists have found is hardly surprising. Therefore, I want to clear up some of the confusion surrounding this topic, and in this post, I will debunk 25 myths, misunderstandings, and faulty arguments about climate change.
internet is full of websites that are devoted to arguing against climate change, and politicians routinely claim that it’s a myth. Nevertheless, among the scientific community, there is no serious debate. Yes, there are a few contrarianism (as there are for virtually every topic), but there is an

At the outset, I want to explain the basics of anthropogenic climate change because there seems to be a lot of confusion over the fundamental concepts. In a nutshell, energy from the sun enters the earth as a spectrum of wavelengths, including both visible light and some higher energy wavelengths (such as ultraviolet [UV] radiation), but some energy is lost and absorbed as the light passes through our atmosphere. The remaining energy is partially absorbed by the earth itself, but much of it is radiated back off of the earth’s surface as lower energy infrared radiation (IR), which is basically just heat energy. Not all of that energy leaves our planet, however, because we have numerous greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere (such as carbon dioxide [CO₂]) that do not absorb the higher energy wavelengths (like UV), but do absorb the lower energy IR. Thus, they trap some of that heat energy and prevent it from exiting the planet. This is usually a good thing, because earth would be inhospitably cold if all of that IR escaped. However, if those gases are too dense, then too much heat gets trapped, and the earth warms. Indeed, fluctuations in greenhouse gases concentrations were largely responsible for past climate changes (see #8). This is a problem because our modern society produces a large quantity of greenhouse gasses, and we have greatly increased their concentration in the atmosphere (see #10). Now, let’s think about this rationally for a second. If CO₂ traps heat, and more CO₂ traps more heat, and we have nearly doubled the CO₂, what do we logically expect to happen? The answer is obvious: the climate should warm on average. Indeed, that is exactly what the theory of anthropogenic climate change predicts, and, as I will demonstrate, we have repeatedly verified that prediction.

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25 myths and bad arguments about climate change | The Logic of Science