Climate change: the science
Climate change is happening, and we’re causing it.
The IPCC, the internationally-recognised authority on climate change, say that ‘most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.’ The IPCC uses the phrase ‘very likely’ to indicate a probability of > 90%.
This isn’t certainty. But, if you are trying to form an opinion, the very best science in the World at the moment says that, were you to disagree with global warming in ten parallel universes, you’d be right less than once. Are you willing to bet all of our futures on those odds?
Rather than duplicate material available elsewhere on the web and provide a massively in-depth explanation of the causes of climate change and rebuttal of the most common arguments against, you can find here a few links to different pages (all from well-respected scientific sources) which do just that.
- Climate change: A guide for the perplexed, from New Scientist, is a great site rebutting various myths propogated by the climate-change-ain’t-happening lobby.
- Climate change controversies: a simple guide from The Royal Society: a nice outline of rebuttals to common arguments against global warming. They also provide a slightly more detailed version as a PDF, called A guide to facts and fictions about climate change.
- A famous, relatively recent paper from Science called The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change which studied 928 papers about climate change and found precisely 0—none, nada—of them to be opposed to the view that it is happening.
I’m happy to update these links to provide a small pool of good reference sources; suggestions welcome.
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