Human Influenced Climate Change

Arguments Against Climate Change

These are some of the arguments used to prevent effective action on climate change.

Climate change is not occurring

This was the original argument used by the carbon industry to discredit climate change and global warming.

Today the vast majority of world experts on climatic issues agree that it is changing, and that the evidence is there for everyone to witness.

Climate change is good for us

A more recent argument used by the carbon industry to confuse the issue of climate change and global warming with the intention of stopping effective action on climate change. Their approach falls into two categories:

1. CO2 fertilisation

This concept relates to the fact that CO2 is sometimes a limiting growth factor for plants. The theory goes that with increases in atmospheric CO2 our agriculture will become much more productive.

However, the storms, floods, fire and drought that are already playing havoc with agriculture are likely to have a significant negative impact, along with the longer term flooding of coastal areas.

2. Some parts of the world will be better to live in

In theory some parts of the world might benefit, from a human point of view, due to global warming. However, at current rates of warming, local ecosystems will collapse and any objective measure of global benefits versus suffering would show much more suffering than benefits gained.

Climate change is natural, therefore we should do nothing

Climate change is natural and natural climate change is occurring constantly. However, natural climate change has been overtaken by human induced climate change which is causing the majority of climate change we are seeing today.

Even if the climate change we are seeing today was totally natural, the disastrous impact is already being felt.

It's unclear how much of today's climate change is caused by humans, therefore we don't really know if we should do anything

Similar to the above argument and equally nonsensical. We can see and feel the impacts of our changing climate and we should do something about it regardless of the cause.

The climate has been much hotter/colder in the past

This argument suggests that because the climate has been more extreme in the past we shouldn't worry about it changing. It conveniently ignores the fact that if we reached either past climate extreme, much of our society and ecology would not survive.

Climate change has been faster in the past

Well it hasn't for the last 800,000 years. Ice core data shows that the fastest rate of CO2 increase over the last 800,000 years was 30 ppm in 1000 years.