This is the new Reality Drop. No games, just truths.

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.
  • #18: Carbon dioxide only causes 35% of global warming

    Deniers say: Some scientists say that CO2 doesn’t even account for half of the warming we’ve seen recently.
    Science says: What's the biggest cause of global warming today? Man-made pollution from carbon dioxide.
    A 2010 study found that methane, ground-level ozone, and black carbon (i.e., soot) increase the global warming effect of carbon dioxide by 65 percent. Some people misread this as a suggestion that carbon dioxide was only responsible for 35 percent as much global warming as previously believed. What it actually says is that these short-term pollutants cause warming IN ADDITION to carbon dioxide. Nothing in the study changes the fact that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the warming we’re seeing today.
  • #28: It’s methane

    Deniers say: Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
    Science says: Does methane trap heat? Yes. But carbon dioxide has caused three times more warming than methane.
    Even though methane is better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, there’s a lot less of it in the atmosphere. Over the last century, carbon dioxide has caused about three times more warming than methane. And sorry, we can’t duck responsibility for methane-induced warming any more than we can for carbon dioxide-induced warming. At least half of the methane in the atmosphere comes from sources like livestock (we’re not talking wild cows, here) along with coal mines and landfills.