Additional Fact Briefs published on Repustar
With an initial batch of eight published Fact Briefs we announced our partnership with the fact-checking organization Repustar at the end of April 2021. Since then, work has progressed in the background and seven more Fact Briefs have been published and are now available for quick rebuttals.
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Do ice core records showing that warming preceded CO2 rise cast doubt on greenhouse warming?
NO - Antarctic ice core records dating back 800,000 years suggest that increases in carbon dioxide lagged behind increases in temperature by a couple of hundred years. This observation has been used by some to incorrectly claim that modern CO2 emissions cannot be causing a rise in temperature. This misconception is based on the false dichotomy that warming is either driven by CO2 or CO2 is driven by warming. In reality, both are true. Read more ...
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Is carbon dioxide incapable of warming the planet any more than it already has?
NO - As CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, trapping and re-radiating heat, Earth continues to warm. Rising CO2 acts like a blanket, reducing the amount of energy escaping into space and causing the lower atmosphere, and surface, to warm.
A long-standing misconception is that the greenhouse effect is “saturated,” suggesting that adding more CO2 will not increase the amount of energy being trapped. This view fails to recognize that the atmosphere consists of multiple layers.. Read more ... |
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Do natural climate cycles disprove that modern global warming is caused by humans?
NO - During Earth’s last glacial period between 120,000 and 11,500 years ago, a number of approximately 1,500-year temperature cycles occurred. Also known as Dansgaard-Deschger events, the cycles caused a transfer of heat between the northern and southern hemispheres, producing a “seesaw effect”: when one hemisphere cooled, the other warmed. Read more ...
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Does the ‘Mike’s trick’ email from the ‘climategate’ controversy show that scientists were falsifying climate change data?
NO - Climate change deniers used out-of-context quotes from stolen emails to incorrectly allege a “climategate” conspiracy that scientists were falsifying temperature data.
In one case, a scientist is misrepresented as saying that he “completed Mike’s nature trick” to “hide the decline.” These two phrases were dishonestly edited together from different parts of a sentence to fabricate suspicion. In reality, the original quote referred to two separate and legitimate practices. Mike’s trick is not a deception, but a trick of the trade. The “trick” involves plotting direct thermometer measurements in the same graph as proxy data from the past to show modern climate change in a long-term context. Read more ... |
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Is there empirical evidence for human-caused global warming?
YES - The greenhouse effect—that atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide warm the planet by trapping and reradiating heat—was first demonstrated using experiments in 1859. Without greenhouse gases, Earth would be nearly 60 degrees Fahrenheit (33°C) cooler. Read more ...
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Are carbon dioxide emissions from human activities enough to affect the climate?
YES - The carbon cycle naturally moves a large amount of carbon dioxide through the climate system. For example, in spring, vegetation increases, absorbing CO2. In the winter, vegetation dies, emitting CO2. Natural CO2 emissions roughly balance natural CO2 absorptions. Read more ... |
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Is Arctic sea ice shrinking?
YES - Arctic sea ice naturally grows and shrinks in an annual cycle given seasonal differences in average temperature. It reaches its annual maximum in March and minimum in September.
Arctic sea ice area and volume have trended downward over the past 40 years. NASA found that September ice extent between 1979 and 2020 has declined by an average of 13.1% per decade. Read more ...
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In addition to putting together these Fact Briefs and getting them ready for publication with the help of Repustar staff, John Garrett (jg) started to create topical share graphics for some of the Fact Briefs which can now be used for sharing our and others' Fact Briefs:
To keep an eye on Skeptical Science’s Fact Briefs on Repustar, bookmark this page and start following @FactSparrow and @GetRepustar on Twitter!
Posted by BaerbelW on Tuesday, 13 July, 2021
