Can you explain climate change to us as if we don’t believe in it? (Addressing biggest denier arguments etc)
Polling about climate change worldwide shows that most people understand climate change and are concerned about it. The largest ever survey to understand how people think about climate change and climate action shows that an average of 64% of people worldwide think that climate change is an emergency that needs rapid action. Despite this, there are still people who deny that climate change exists or that it needs to be urgently responded to.
There is some research that suggests that trying to win over “climate sceptics” with arguments about the irrefutable findings of climate science doesn’t really help convince them. It may even push them further into denial of climate change. If we are having a conversation about climate change with someone who doesn’t “believe” in climate change, we should try to be aware of what they value – and then speak about those things in relation to climate change.
This question also asks about some of the biggest ‘denier’ arguments, so let’s address those:
Climate change isn’t anthropogenic (caused by humans)
The argument here is that the climate has always changed and that current climate change is just a natural phenomenon. Decades of painstaking climate science show this is not the case. Putting more CO2 in the atmosphere causes the planet to heat. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have fluctuated over geological time, but we know that over the past million years they have never been as high as they are today and that the current increase is definitely caused by human activity.
Climate scientists don’t agree that climate change is happening
This is not true. Research shows that 99% of publishing scientists who work in the area of climate change agree that climate change is happening now and that it is anthropogenic.
We can’t do anything about climate change (it’s too late)
It’s true that we have left it very late to take meaningful action on climate change – but it is not too late to make transformational change that will reduce the worst impacts of climate change. We can’t return to the climate of the past, but we can work towards the best possible future under climate change. We have no time to waste.
It’s been cold lately – that’s proof that climate change isn’t happening
Incorrect. This claim confuses weather and climate. Weather always fluctuates day to day. Climate is the long term average of weather. And that long term average is changing: the planet is definitely heating up. We know it has heated 1.1°C since pre0industrial times.
If you’d like to do some more reading and thinking about how to talk with climate change deniers, you can start with this excellent article by BBC.
