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Humans are not responsible for modern climate change

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Daily sea surface temperature (°C) averaged over the extra-polar global ocean (60°S–60°N) for all 12-month periods spanning June to May of the following year. The last 12 months (June 2023 to May 2024) are shown with a thick red line, the period from June 2015 to May 2016 with a blue line, and the period from June 2022 to May 2023 with an orange line. All other years are shown with thin grey lines. The light-red colour shading highlights the margin by which daily values in 2023–2024 exceeded previous daily records. Data source: ERA5. Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF.

Scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the reality of climate change. According to the World Meteorological Organization’s 2023 report, 2023 was the warmest year on record, with greenhouse gas levels, sea surface temperatures, and sea level rise at unprecedented heights. The past nine years, from 2015 to 2023, have been the warmest on record. These findings align with NASA’s analysis reporting a significant rise in the average global temperature since 1880, primarily occurring since 1975, at an alarming rate.

Contrary to the narrative that climate change does not exist, scientific consensus globally confirms that climate change is real and largely caused by human activities. The European Climate Risk Assessment (2023) and the World Economic Forum Global Risk Report (2024) further emphasize the severe impact of human activity, requiring urgent action to mitigate climate change effects. Among the effects that extreme weather is causing are food and water security threats and the impact on ecosystems. Additionally, the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presents evidence of human-driven global warming, highlighting the pressing need for drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Myth

Humans are not responsible for modern climate change. Earth’s climate has always been changing.

Λεζάντα εικόνας: The influence of natural and anthropogenic factors on climate change in different models for the period 2010–2019. Source: IPCC Report 2021, AR6 WGI, Figure 3.8.
The influence of natural and anthropogenic climate change factors for the period 1850–2019. Source: IPCC Report 2021, AR6 WGI, Figure FAQ 3.1.

Facts

The global scientific consensus among climate experts is that humans are the overwhelming cause of modern climate change. A series of recent reviews and surveys report agreements of 97-99% among publishing climate scientists (Cook 2016, Powell 2019, Lynas 2021, Myers 2021). The consensus first formed in the 1990s and has continued strengthening since then.

It is true that among the billions of years of planet Earth, its climate has been changing between vast geological eras. However, modern climate change bears many distinctive differences compared to the previous instances of change.

As the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report explains (IPCC 2023), the global temperature has increased by more than 1°C compared to the pre-industrial period; an increase unprecedented for tenths of thousands of years, and with a rate that is extremely fast compared to the natural events that led to previous climate change events.

A top cause for the previous events were natural Earth’s movements, called Milankovitch cycles. Scientific models predict these movements with extreme precision and they indicate that naturally they wouldn’t lead to Earth warming for hundreds of thousands of years. These models also suggest that the next natural climate era would not be warming but cooling, which has been overturned by the vast amounts of human-caused climate emissions.

The human source of these emissions has been verified through many lines of evidence, including chemical signatures. The level and rate of these emissions is again unprecedented on a global scale for hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

Other pieces of evidence that support the human role, is the simultaneous warming across all global regions, as well as the way that different layers of the atmosphere are getting heated, which contrast with previous natural instances of warming.

Altogether, all validated scientific climate models estimate that over the past decades, natural climate effects have been negligible, and it’s impossible to explain the rapid recorded warming without taking into account the combined human effects.

Fact-check by Andronikos Koutroumpelis, http://FactReview.gr