Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Global warming is real and human-caused. It is leading to large-scale climate change. Under the guise of climate "skepticism", the public is bombarded with misinformation that casts doubt on the reality of human-caused global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming "skepticism".
Our mission is simple: debunk climate misinformation by presenting peer-reviewed science and explaining the techniques of science denial, discourses of climate delay, and climate solutions denial.
Posted on 17 June 2025 by Ken Rice
On November 1, 2024 we announced the publication of 33 rebuttals based on the report "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles" written by Matthew Eisenson, Jacob Elkin, Andy Fitch, Matthew Ard, Kaya Sittinger & Samuel Lavine and published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in 2024. Below is the blog post version of rebuttal #33 based on Sabin's report.
Extreme temperatures can decrease EV range, particularly extreme cold, but this issue is not unique to EVs. According to a 2019 American Automobile Association report, when compared to conditions of 75°F with the HVAC set to Off, a typical EV’s range decreased by 12% at 20°F, and by 4% at 95°F1. When comparing conditions with the HVAC set to Auto, a temperature drop from 72°F to 20°F decreased a typical EV’s range by 41%2, and a temperature rise from 72°F to 95°F decreased range by 17%. However, EV models are increasingly adopting heat pump technology in place of traditional electric resistance heating3, which can minimize the electricity consumption associated with heating an electric vehicle in extreme cold4.
Traditional gasoline-powered cars are likewise susceptible to extreme weather conditions. Fuel economy tests have also shown a decrease in mileage per gallon for conventional gasoline cars due to temperature drops, with mileage roughly 15% lower at 20°F than at 72°F5. As with EVs, decreased fuel efficiency for conventional gasoline cars in extreme weather is partially attributable to increased reliance on HVAC systems. Both EVs and gasoline-powered cars are likewise susceptible to cold temperatures lowering tire pressure6.
Data from a roadside assistance company in Norway suggests that, by one metric, EVs may actually be more reliable than gasoline-powered cars in the cold7. In particular, whereas internal combustion engines sometimes have trouble starting in the cold, this problem appears to be less common for EVs: while 23% of cars in Norway are EVs, only 13% of reported cases involving cars that failed to turn on in the cold were EVs8.
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Posted on 16 June 2025 by dana1981
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
President Donald Trump has promised to reduce gas prices, improve energy security, create domestic manufacturing jobs, boost the economy, and ensure that Americans breathe the cleanest air. But by gutting the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, Congress’ big new budget bill would undermine all of these objectives – and more.
House Republicans’ top two priorities are to extend the soon-to-expire tax cuts that they passed in 2017, and to minimize the amount that doing so will add to the nation’s over $36 trillion in debt. The massive budget bill they narrowly passed in May is their effort to achieve both.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the House bill’s proposed tax cuts would add about $4.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade – more than a 12% increase from today’s levels.
To pay for some of those tax cuts, the House bill would repeal most of the IRA’s climate and clean energy investments. The IRA, passed by Democrats in 2022, committed hundreds of billions of dollars to developing clean energy and fighting climate change.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the proposed repeal of climate and clean energy investments would shave $567 billion off the tax bill’s additions to the national debt. But repealing those investments would also come at a cost.
Eight groups have analyzed the specific impacts the tax bill’s IRA repeal would have on Americans. Three – at Princeton, Energy Innovation (a Yale Climate Connections content-sharing partner), and Rhodium Group – evaluated the impacts of the entire bill, while five others – Aurora Energy Research, Resources for the Future, Brattle Group, National Economic Research Associates, and Solar Energy Industries Association – looked specifically at the repeal of the IRA’s clean electricity tax credits.
The results were consistent in finding that Republicans’ proposed IRA repeal would increase household energy bills, imperil a nascent domestic manufacturing boom, raise the risks of power outages, disadvantage artificial intelligence development U.S., and increase pollution at the expense of the health of U.S. residents – all outcomes that undermine Trump’s stated goals.
A number of Republican Senators have expressed discomfort with the handling of clean energy in the House bill and may make significant changes in their version.
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Posted on 15 June 2025 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom
A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, June 8, 2025 thru Sat, June 14, 2025.
Stories we promoted this week, by category:
Climate Science and Research (8 articles)
- Stefan Rahmstorf - Atlantic ocean circulation: a dangerous tipping point for European climate? IFIMAC on Youtube, Stefan Rahmstorf, May 27, 2025.
- Ocean mud locks up much of the planet’s carbon – we’re digging deep to map these ancient stores Deep down at the bottom of the sea, mud is one of the most important natural archives of Earth’s past – holding clues of shifting climates, coastlines, ocean conditions and carbon storage. The Conversation, Sophie Ward & Zoe Roseby, June 6, 2025.
- When will a vital system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean collapse? Depends on whom you ask. New research suggests the currents that help shape the climate may be weakening more slowly than thought. Grist, Rebecca Egan McCarthy, Jun 09, 2025.
- Ocean acidity crosses vital threshold, study finds TheHill.com Just In, Saul Elbein, Jun 09, 2025.
- The role of aerosol declines in recent warming SO2 declines have contributed ~25% of recent warming and driven recent acceleration. The Climate Brink, Zeke Hausfather, Jun 10, 2025.
- Ocean current `collapse` could trigger `profound cooling` in northern Europe - even with global warming A “collapse” of key Atlantic ocean currents would cause winter temperatures to plunge across northern Europe, overriding the warming driven by human activity, which seems a good reason not to accidentally break the AMOC. Carbon Brief, Cecilia Keating, Jun 11, 2025.
- Skeptical Science New Research for Week #24 2025 A weekly digest of recently published research on matters of human-caused climate change, how we'll fix Earth's climate and/or learn to live with the mess we've made. Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack, Jun 12, 2025.
- New Climate Study Highlights Dire Sea Level Warmings To learn about how polar ice sheets melted during an ancient era, scientists examined fossil coral reefs in the tropics. Inside Climate News, Bob Berwyn, Jun 13, 2025.
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Posted on 14 June 2025 by Sue Bin Park
Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.
Was 1934 the hottest year in the global record?
1934 was a particularly hot year in the contiguous United States, but not globally exceptional. Worldwide, 1934 was a relatively cooler year and does not stand out in the global record.
The myth began when NASA corrected 6 years of erroneous U.S. temperature data in 2007, shifting 1934 ahead in the U.S. dataset due to earlier calculation errors. Adjustments accounted for factors like time-of-observation bias and weather station changes. Regionally, 1934’s U.S. heat was part of the Dust Bowl, a crisis caused by drought and poor land management.
However, while regional temperature spikes occur naturally, global climate change concerns long-term and worldwide trends.
Global temperatures have risen since the Industrial Revolution, driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases. The ten hottest years on record were between 2015 and 2025. 1934 saw a global temperature anomaly of -0.16 C, while 2024’s record high was 1.28 C above the 20th century average.
Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact
This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.
Sources
National Drought Mitigation Center The Dust Bowl
World Meteorological Organization State of the Global Climate 2024
The Climate Brink Which was warmer: the 1930s or the last 10 years
PolitiFact 1936 in the United States was “much hotter than 2023."
EPA Climate Change Indicators: U.S. and Global Temperature
NASA Evidence
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Posted on 12 June 2025 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack
Open access notables
A Rapid Deterioration of the Transmissive Atmospheric Radiative Regime in the Western Arctic, Bertossa & L’Ecuyer, Geophysical Research Letters:
The tendency for the atmosphere to reside in one of two radiative states (“transmissive” or “opaque”) is unique to the high latitudes. This phenomenon makes the Arctic climate particularly sensitive to change if the conditions that support one of these states vanish. This study examines 25 years of in-situ data from the North Slope of Alaska to investigate how these two states have changed over time. While November once had nearly equal occurrences of both states, the transmissive state has almost completely disappeared, resulting in an increase of over 30 W/m2 in surface downwelling longwave radiation since the turn of the century. This dramatic shift highlights a crucial climate feedback that any region prone to sea ice loss may experience—reducing the transmissive state enhances atmospheric warming and moistening, further promoting the opaque state. This feedback accelerates surface energy imbalances and could amplify Arctic change beyond current projections.
This work was supported, in part, by the NASA Earth Ventures-Instrument (EV-I) program's Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-Infrared Experiment (PREFIRE) mission under Grant 80NSSC18K1485.
Regional emperor penguin population declines exceed modelled projections, Fretwell et al., Communications Earth & Environment:
Emperor penguin populations are predicted to decline rapidly over the current century owing to habitat loss in Antarctica arising from warming oceans and loss of seasonal sea ice. Previous work using very high-resolution satellite imagery from 2009 to 2018 revealed a population decrease of 9.5%, characterized by a continuous decline until 2016, with a slight recovery until 2018. Our study, for the sector 0° to 90°W, includes the recent period of sea-ice loss between 2020 and 2023 and provides a regional population update for around a third of the global population. We used supervised classification of very high-resolution imagery, linked to a Markov model and Bayesian statistics. Results indicate a significant reduction in emperor penguin numbers, variance in the methodology is relatively high, but provides a best fit estimate of 22% decline over the period equating to a reduction of 1.6% per year. This decline exceeds the predictions of demographic models based on high-emission scenarios. It is unclear whether the sector analyzed here reflects conditions around the entire continent and our results highlight the need to extend the analysis to all sectors of Antarctica to determine whether these trends are reflected elsewhere.
Considering durability in carbon dioxide removal strategies for climate change mitigation, Streck et al., Climate Policy:
Durability – together with scalability and sustainability – is an essential condition of CDR. It depends on (i) the duration of CO2 storage and (ii) the risk of reversing such storage. The risk profile of durability varies widely across CDR methods. Because engineered, novel CDR methods involve more stable forms of CO2 storage than nature-based CDR, these methods are often promoted as a priority for CDR mitigation investments. However, shorter-term CDR plays an essential role in balancing sources and sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century. Decision makers must also consider CDR policies in a larger context that takes into account readiness and feasibility, policy alignment and co-benefits of different CDR methods. They must also address durability in CDR policies and contracts, which tend to span much shorter timeframes than those contemplated by science when discussing durability. We argue that nature-based conventional CDR and novel engineered CDR that show complementary timing and risk profiles can be deployed in synergistic CDR portfoliosto balance the conditions of durability, feasibility and social and environmental sustainability.
Warming accelerates global drought severity, Gebrechorkos et al., Nature:
Drought is one of the most common and complex natural hazards affecting the environment, economies and populations globally. However, there are significant uncertainties in global drought trends, and a limited understanding of the extent to which a key driver, atmospheric evaporative demand (AED), impacts the recent evolution of the magnitude, frequency, duration and areal extent of droughts. Here, by developing an ensemble of high-resolution global drought datasets for 1901–2022, we find an increasing trend in drought severity worldwide. Our findings suggest that AED has increased drought severity by an average of 40% globally. Not only are typically dry regions becoming drier but also wet areas are experiencing drying trends. During the past 5 years (2018–2022), the areas in drought have expanded by 74% on average compared with 1981–2017, with AED contributing to 58% of this increase. The year 2022 was record-breaking, with 30% of the global land area affected by moderate and extreme droughts, 42% of which was attributed to increased AED. Our findings indicate that AED has an increasingly important role in driving severe droughts and that this tendency will likely continue under future warming scenarios.
From this week's government/NGO section:
The Scale of Significance: Power Plants, Peter Howard and Jason Schwartz, Institute for Policy Integrity
The Trump Administration is openly questioning the significance of U.S. contributions to climate change, playing down U.S. greenhouse gas emissions as contributing only “some mysterious amount above zero to climate change.” According to a leaked draft of a proposed regulatory repeal, Trump’s EPA will compare the U.S. power sector’s greenhouse gas emissions to worldwide totals and find, judged on that relative scale, the sector’s contribution to climate change is neither “significant” nor “meaningful.” That kind of skewed appraisal would produce the reductio ad absurdum under which no U.S. sector, sliced thinly enough, is ever a significant source of greenhouse gases—a clearly irrational outcome. By any measure, emissions from major U.S. industries like the electric power sector contribute significantly to climate damages. The best available evidence shows that each year of greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. coal-fired and gas-fired power plants will contribute to climate damages responsible for thousands of U.S. deaths and hundreds of billions in economics harms.
Beyond LCOE: A Systems-Oriented Perspective for Evaluating Electricity Decarbonization Pathways, Moraski et al., Clean Air Task Force
Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) is a widely used standardized metric to assess electricity generation project costs per expected generation output. Often used to compare technology costs, LCOE has become a ubiquitous metric used in electricity industry literature, cost forecasts, project business cases, and policy making. The LCOE metric is popular in part due to its simplicity and standardization and has been used widely to display LCOE declines of solar and wind. LCOE is calculated by summing the discounted project cost, primarily capital and operating expenditures, and dividing those costs by the discounted expected electricity generation over the life of the project. While LCOE is a good metric to track historical technology cost evolution, it is not an appropriate tool to use in the context of long-term planning and policymaking for deep decarbonization. The authors explain why LCOE fails to reflect the full complexity of electricity systems and can lead to decisions that jeopardize reliability, affordability, and clean generation.
112 articles in 51 journals by 634 contributing authors
Physical science of climate change, effects
A Rapid Deterioration of the Transmissive Atmospheric Radiative Regime in the Western Arctic, Bertossa & L’Ecuyer, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2025gl115362
Drivers of the extreme North Atlantic marine heatwave during 2023, England et al., Nature Open Access 10.1038/s41586-025-08903-5
Effective Heat Capacity and Its Role in Arctic Amplification, Previdi & Polvani, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2025gl115061
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Posted on 11 June 2025 by Guest Author
This video includes personal musings and conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).
To stop global warming, carbon emissions need to be cut to net zero as quickly as possible. And while some countries have been cutting back on fossil fuels, some major polluters - like China - have seen their emissions continue to increase. But thanks to the epic rise in clean energy solutions, it's just possible that that's starting to shift, and China's path to a low carbon future might be about to change for ever...
Support ClimateAdam on patreon: https://patreon.com/climateadam
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Posted on 10 June 2025 by Ken Rice
On November 1, 2024 we announced the publication of 33 rebuttals based on the report "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles" written by Matthew Eisenson, Jacob Elkin, Andy Fitch, Matthew Ard, Kaya Sittinger & Samuel Lavine and published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in 2024. Below is the blog post version of rebuttal #32 based on Sabin's report.
The majority of EVs can travel roughly 200 miles on a single charge and some models can travel over 400 miles on a single charge.1,2,3 Although the median range of a gasoline vehicle (403 miles) is roughly twice that of an EV (234 miles)1, the range of a standard EV is more than enough to meet the daily needs of median U.S. households.3 A 2016 study found that the travel requirements of 87% of vehicle-days could be met by existing, affordable electric vehicles (Needell et al. 2016). The average range of electric vehicles has only increased since then, from roughly 145 miles in 2016 to roughly 217 miles in 2021.2 Because most EV drivers charge their vehicles overnight at their home, most of these drivers can go about their daily driving with no need to stop to recharge.4
EV range is also benefiting from the build-out of charging infrastructure. The United States is rapidly building electric charging ports, more than tripling those in operation, from approximately 52,500 in 2017 to approximately 184,000 in 2023.5 For comparison, there are approximately 150,000 gas stations in the United States, which likely include about 900,000 to 1.8 million individual pumps.6 In addition, the United States installed 6,300 fast chargers in 2022, which brought the national total to 28,000 fast chargers.7 The next year, in 2023, the United States installed 10,651 public fast chargers, 56% more than in 2022.8 Using funds from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the United States has pledged to build 500,000 charging stations by 2030.9 On a global scale, by 2022 there were 2.7 million EV chargers in operation worldwide, with more than 900,000 installed in 2022 alone, a 55% increase from 2021.7
Figure 17: Representation of fast-charging ports installed in the United States each year from 2013 to 2023. Source: Michael Thomas, Distilled (reproduced with permission).8
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Posted on 9 June 2025 by dana1981
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
The Trump administration has taken an ostrich-like approach to climate change.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is required to publish a report about the country’s sources of climate-changing pollution each year by April 15. This year, that didn’t happen. But the completed report was recently made public as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Environmental Defense Fund.
This latest U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report provides granular detail on U.S. emissions in 2023. It’s unclear why the administration withheld this report, which had been completed, and thus its suppression offered no budgetary benefit. But suppressing the report lines up with the Trump Administration’s general attack on climate action.
Among his Day One executive orders, the president announced America’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and declared “a national energy emergency” that focused primarily on expanding fossil fuel production while largely halting low-carbon wind power development. His administration subsequently began purging the phrases “climate crisis” and “climate science” from government websites, dismantling climate and weather research, firing climate scientists at federal agencies, and even attempting to cancel the next National Climate Assessment Report.
The EPA report itself offers some good news regarding modest reductions in U.S. climate pollution through 2023. But it’s a trend that may not continue, let alone accelerate as needed to meet climate targets, if the administration and Congress are successful in implementing proposed rollbacks of pollution regulations and clean energy policies.
U.S. coal consumption and climate pollution declined in 2023
The EPA report documents that in 2023, U.S. climate pollution fell by 2.3%. That’s about 147 million metric tons, or MMT, of reduced carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases.
2023 was the first full year after President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ signature climate law that committed hundreds of billions of dollars to reducing climate pollution.
The continued long-term decline in U.S. coal consumption accounted for the bulk of the reduction in emissions in 2023. In fact, an 18% decline in carbon pollution from coal accounted for 164 MMT in reduced emissions, which is more than the nation’s overall emissions reduction for the year. Higher carbon emissions from natural gas offset some of that coal decline, increasing by 1%, or a bit under 18 MMT.
Annual U.S. electric power generation (colored bars; billion kilowatt-hours) and associated greenhouse gas emissions (blue line; million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents). Source: Figure 2-8 from the EPA Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory Report.
Arguments
Measurements of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are consistent, reliable, and globally verified across multiple independent systems.
(Image credit: Collage by Samantha Harrington. Portrait photos via Jeff Masters and Bob Henson. Hurricane Maria damage photo by U.S. Air Force, Airman 1st Class Nicholas Dutton / Public Domain. Hurricane and satellite by NASA Johnson / Public Domain.
