Arguments
Software
Resources
Comments
The Consensus Project
Translations
About
Support
Latest Posts
- Skeptical Science New Research for Week #47 2024
- Durability of carbon dioxide removal is critical for stabilizing temperatures
- Sabin 33 #3 - Solar panels generate too much waste and will overwhelm landfills
- Here’s how governments could fix their Paris climate commitment failures
- 2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46
- Skeptical Science New Research for Week #46 2024
- 20 fact briefs published in collaboration with Gigafact!
- Sabin 33 #2 - Are toxic heavy metals from solar panels posing a threat to human health?
- 2024 will be the first year above 1.5°C
- 2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #45
- Fact brief - Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming?
- Skeptical Science New Research for Week #45 2024
- The planet is ‘on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,’ scientists warn
- Sabin 33 #1 - Are electromagnetic fields from solar farms harmful to human health?
- Volunteer activity: Evaluate automated climate misinformation debunkings
- 2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44
- Fact brief - Are most glaciers growing?
- Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles thanks to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law
- Skeptical Science New Research for Week #44 2024
- The hidden health toll of hurricanes
- Climate Adam: Is climate change fuelling mega hurricanes?
- Jobs in wind, solar, and energy storage are booming. Is your state keeping up?
- 2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #43
- Fact brief - Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans?
- Skeptical Science New Research for Week #43 2024
- Why widening highways doesn’t reduce traffic congestion
- Climate Risk
- Welcome to the world of personal air conditioning
- 2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #42
- Skeptical Science New Research for Week #42 2024
Archived Rebuttal
This is the archived Basic rebuttal to the climate myth "It's only a few degrees". Click here to view the latest rebuttal.
What the science says...
|
A few degrees of global warming has a huge impact on ice sheets, sea levels and other aspects of climate. |
There are 3 problems with even small sounding global warming. Firstly, 2 °C is a very optimistic assessment: if the skeptical Dr Roy Spencer is correct here then we’re on course to get more like 3.5 °C. If most climate science is correct then we’ll get 6 °C by doubling CO2 twice.
Secondly, if we cause a ~2 °C warming, some scientists think feedbacks such as melting permafrost releasing more greenhouse gases might kick in. Ice and sediment cores suggest we haven’t been this warm in at least 600,000 years so we’re not sure – but this could trigger a lot more warming.
Finally, 6 °C, the actual “best estimate” for eventual global warming from current CO2 trends still sounds small. But heating isn’t distributed evenly: as we came out of the last ice age, the temperature in northern countries rose by more than at the equator. When you average over the entire world it turns out to have only been about 6 °C global warming: for people living in Northern Europe and Canada it’s the difference between walking around in a t-shirt and a mile of ice over your head.
The graph below is the temperature calculated over the past 400,000 years in Antarctica from the Vostok ice core. The tiny peaks are a bit like today and the tiny troughs would force hundreds of millions from their homes. A few degrees of warming might sound small, but it can mean a lot and this is why scientists look at what the impacts of warming will be, rather than just saying “it doesn’t look like much so it can’t matter”.
Basic rebuttal written by MarkR
Update July 2015:
Here is a related lecture-video from Denial101x - Making Sense of Climate Science Denial
Updated on 2015-08-02 by MichaelK.
THE ESCALATOR
(free to republish)