Facts Shatter Global Warming Denier Claims

Global warming climate change is happening.x20 A major cause of it is the burning of fossil fuels. The effects of it will be severe and damaging. We are already seeing some effects in extreme weather events, melting glaciers and rising seas. Those are the facts. But ExxonMobil did not like the facts, and funded a propaganda campaign to combat them.x21 “Victory will be achieved when recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom,’” said a 1998 American Petroleum Institute memo about the budding propaganda campaign.x22 From what I’ve been hearing, it seems ExxonMobil got its “victory”. For example, one of my colleagues thought global warming is a political plot to advance world government. But that would mean that the best scientific organizations and journals in the world are in on the plot.x23 More likely, my colleague was wearing a very shiny tinfoil hat. In another case, a friend of mine thinks the fact of Vikings farming in Greenland 1000 years ago proves a natural warm phase, warmer than the present. But the Viking settlement shows little about worldwide temperature and much about human tenacity.x24 The Vikings had sparse farms with skinny animals, and used up more and more of the land over the course of two centuries before the last of them starved during a bad winter. Another friend of mine gave me a copy of the documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” and said it was a BBC production. It turns out the video is not a BBC production, but a propaganda piece full of already debunked global warming denier arguments.x25 I found the answers to these arguments from the website RC Wiki—an index to debunkings of such nonsense that appears in the popular media. RC Wiki is a supplement to RealClimate.org, a reliable source for climate science, written by climate scientists.