Topics:
Claim:
Global warming is just the end of the Little Ice Age; Warming is slower than climate models forecasted; Carbon dioxide is beneficial to Earth; Global warming is not intensifying or increasing the frequency of natural disasters
These findings were widely covered by popular media outlets, including in articles published by The Guardian, CNN, and BBC, which all reported that this temperature increase would represent a breach of the key IPCC threshold. However, this is missing some important context.
“A single year above 1.5°C does not mean the world has passed that particular warming level”, said Zeke Hausfather. Such nuance was better captured by articles published in Reuters and Axios, which both correctly did not report that these new temperature projections, if realized, would constitute a breach of the threshold.
Claim:
Climate changed naturally in prehistoric eras, modern climate change is a naturally occurring phenomenon
“It is true that renewable energy developments like solar and wind farms (along with the power lines to connect them to the grid) can impact negatively on birds and other wildlife, but compared to other human driven causes of bird mortality the impact remains small,” noted Aldina Franco, an avian ecologist at the University of East Anglia.
Claim:
“The question is, ‘how much of an impact do we have on [climate]?’ That has not totally been quantified”; climate change is happening anyway, “The ice age happened without us…It’s probably this constant cycle”.
Claim:
“Believing CO2 controls the climate is pretty close to believing in magic.”
Claim:
“Natural variation explains a substantial part of global warming observed since 1850;” no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying natural disasters, or making them more frequent.
Claim:
Carbon dioxide is not a climate heat driver; we had an ice age when the Earth had extraordinarily larger amounts of carbon dioxide; in the 1970s scientists thought we were going to have a new ice age.
Claim:
”Global warming started to run out of steam over two decades ago… Half of the apparent global temperature increase from January 1910 to January 2000 is due to administrative adjustments.”
“The thing to remember is that drought is a very complex phenomenon. For one, drought is not just precipitation. Drought is also soil moisture and streamflow. This is an important distinction, because it means that other processes that may be affected by climate change (e.g., evaporation) can play a role in increasing drought, even if precipitation does not change.”