copenlu/druid huggingface dataset:
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2024-04-09): Carbon dioxide is Earth’s most important greenhouse gas: a gas that absorbs and radiates heat. Unlike oxygen or nitrogen (which make up most of our atmosphere), greenhouse gases absorb heat radiating from the Earth’s surface and re-release it in all directions—including back toward Earth’s surface. Without carbon dioxide, Earth’s natural greenhouse effect would be too weak to keep the average global surface temperature above freezing. By adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, people are supercharging the natural greenhouse effect, causing global temperature to rise. According to observations by the NOAA Global Monitoring Lab, in 2021 carbon dioxide alone was responsible for about two-thirds of the total heating influence of all human-produced greenhouse gases. [...] Natural increases in carbon dioxide concentrations have periodically warmed Earth’s temperature during ice age cycles over the past million years or more. The warm episodes (interglacials) began with a small increase in incoming sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere due to variations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun and its axis of rotation. (For more details, see the "Milankovitch cycles and ice ages" section of our Climate change: incoming sunlight article.) That little bit of extra sunlight caused a little bit of warming. As the oceans warmed, they outgassed carbon dioxide—like a can of soda going flat in the heat of a summer day. The extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere greatly amplified the initial, solar-driven warming.
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2024-01-22): The causes of climate change and global warming are well-known among the international scientific community. Scientific consensus based on overwhelming evidence, beyond reasonable doubt, shows that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are the main driver of current global warming, not the Sun. Elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide has multiple direct and indirect impacts on the hydrosphere and biosphere, including ocean acidification and arctic sea ice loss due to global warming which affects polar bears. [...] Soon: "What we know now is CO2 ain’t gonna cause nothing. It’s not gonna change much of the climatic system…it won’t make any difference with the polar bear population…it won’t even cause what they call ocean acidification" (minute 8:39) [...] The direct and indirect environmental impacts of high anthropogenic-CO2 emissions are not just related to temperature increases, but also other changes across different components of the Earth system. Aside from air temperature warming, climate change has been observed with the oceans getting warmer, ice sheets shrinking, glaciers retreating, snow cover decreasing, sea level rising, arctic sea ice decreasing, and extreme weather events increasing in frequency (see here for evidence provided by NASA). Soon’s specific claims that CO2 does not make any difference with the polar bear populations nor cause ocean acidification are inaccurate and explored in detail in Box 1.
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2017-03-23): - Ruling out natural factors that can influence climate like the Sun and ocean cycles (research beginning in 1830s) [...] Skeptics sometimes point to the last two supporting lines of evidence as weaknesses. They’re not. But even if you choose to doubt them, it is really the first seven that, combined, point to human activities as the only explanation of rising global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, and the subsequent climate changes (such as ice melt and sea level rise) that have occurred due to this global warming. The science is settled, and the sooner we accept this, the sooner we can work together towards addressing the problems caused by climate change – and towards a better future for us all.
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2007-07-23): The Earth is heating up, and human beings burning fossil fuels are the dominant cause. It’s not ocean warming that dominates, it’s not cosmic rays, it’s not variations in the Earth’s orbit and tilt toward the sun (Milankovitch cycles), it’s not solar irradiance – it’s us. But there is a very vocal minority that refuses to accept that global heating is real. [...] - Myth #5: CO2 is such a weak greenhouse gas that it cannot be the cause of the observed warming. [...] DENIER MYTH#18: The influence of CO2 cannot match the influence of water vapor, and since the impacts of water vapor are largely unknown and outside direct human control, human beings cannot be the source of global heating (Source: Comments on Digg.com’s post about this blog originally, but scattered around the net as well).
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2019-05-15): It is not. The problem is that we don’t know what to do about it, and even if we knew, we wouldn’t have the means to actually do it. And nothing whatsoever has changed about this since I learned of climate change in school, some time in the 1980s. Gluing yourself to a train will not create the policies and the institutions we would need to implement them. A good example for this bizarre problem-denial is Greta Thunberg, here speaking to a crowd of about 10,000 people in Helsinki: "The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we need to do is to wake up and change." [...] Either way you turn it, resources that we spend today on limiting carbon-dioxide emissions are resources we cannot spend on something else, resources that will not go to education, research, social welfare, infrastructure. Oh, and they will also not go into that next larger particle collider.
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2017-01-01): Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change. CO2 is absorbed and emitted naturally as part of the carbon cycle, through respiration, volcanic eruptions, and ocean-atmosphere exchange. Human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, release large amounts of carbon to the atmosphere, causing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to rise. [...] In 2007, the IPCC was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize for its work in the area of global climate change. The IPCC is organized through the United Nations and is composed of over 3,000 scientists from around the world who are working together to understand current climate change and project future climate scenarios. As of 2011, the IPCC has released four comprehensive reports, and it has concluded, "Most of the observed increase in global average temperature since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." This widely known statement essentially means that the probability of occurrence is greater than 90% that the current global warming is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. In response to these findings, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has called for numerous international meetings in cities including Kyoto, Bali, Copenhagen, and others where the leaders of world have gathered to discuss strategies to mitigate this looming disaster. At these meetings, scientists, politicians and world leaders review the current state of knowledge about the problem and strategize for the future. This chapter will take a large-scale view of the global challenges of climate change.
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2024-08-16): Applying statistical models (such as ARIMA or Hurst–Kolmogorov) to the past temperature data can generate a prediction for the future, but the confidence limits (95%) are so wide that the predictions are useless. And this approach cannot say that CO2 is causing the change. Thus, the climate models that predict a temperature response to CO2 have to be deterministic; that is, they assume that the inputs will determine the temperature. Hence the assertion based on these models that CO2 causes global warming is circular reasoning. Worse, even as recently as a decade ago climate models could not deal with factors like cloud cover. Computers are getting faster, and climate models are getting more sophisticated, but significant areas of the climate are still beyond our modelling reach. [...] The claim that 97% of scientists agree that human-generated CO2 will cause catastrophic warming to planet earth is fake news. Even if it were accurate, it would not prove that it is correct. It is the fallacious ‘argument from consensus’. As Michael Crichton said, "Consensus is the business of politics. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period." [...] In the USA, the Global Warming Petition Project has garnered the signatures of some 31,500 scientists resident in the USA alone, including over 9,000 with PhDs, who dispute the claim that CO2 will cause serious problems.28 This alone casts serious doubt on the 97% figure.
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2024-05-26): Blaming every major weather disaster on man-made global warming defies common sense, as well as the historical data record. [...] "Claim: Climate scientists disagree about how much warming is associated with our emissions and whether this warming is larger than natural climate variability from the sun and volcanic eruptions" "Key takeaway: Scientific evidence shows that modern global warming is primarily driven by increasing CO2 emissions from human activities. There is no evidence that solar variations or volcanic activity are substantial drivers of recent climate change."
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2012-04-04): This chapter frames the context, knowledge-base and assessment approaches used to understand the impacts of 1.5°C global warming above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, building on the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty. [...] Past emissions alone are unlikely to raise global-mean temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (medium confidence), but past emissions do commit to other changes, such as further sea level rise (high confidence). If all anthropogenic emissions (including aerosol-related) were reduced to zero immediately, any further warming beyond the 1°C already experienced would likely be less than 0.5°C over the next two to three decades (high confidence), and likely less than 0.5°C on a century time scale (medium confidence), due to the opposing effects of different climate processes and drivers. A warming greater than 1.5°C is therefore not geophysically unavoidable: whether it will occur depends on future rates of emission reductions. {1.2.3, 1.2.4}
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2019-12-14): Apart from the issue of how much greenhouse gases might increase, there is a great deal of uncertainty about much the planet will warm in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide – referred to as ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ (ECS). The IPCC 5th Assessment Report (2013) provided a range between 1 and 6oC, with a ‘likely’ range between 1.5 and 4.5oC. [...] To further complicate climate model projections for the 21st century, the climate models focus only on manmade climate change – they make no attempt to predict natural climate variations from the sun’s output, volcanic eruptions and long-term variations in ocean circulation patterns. We have no idea how natural climate variability will play out in the 21st century, and whether or not natural variability will dominate over manmade warming. [...] We don’t know how the climate of the 21st century will evolve, and we will undoubtedly be surprised. Given this uncertainty, precise emissions targets and deadlines are scientifically meaningless. We can avoid much of the political gridlock by implementing common sense, no-regrets strategies that improve energy technologies, lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient to extreme weather events.
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2018-05-03): Food security will be increasingly affected by projected future climate change (high confidence). Across Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) 1, 2, and 3, global crop and economic models projected a 1–29% cereal price increase in 2050 due to climate change (RCP 6.0), which would impact consumers globally through higher food prices; regional effects will vary (high confidence). Low-income consumers are particularly at risk, with models projecting increases of 1–183 million additional people at risk of hunger across the SSPs compared to a no climate change scenario (high confidence). While increased CO2 is projected to be beneficial for crop productivity at lower temperature increases, it is projected to lower nutritional quality (high confidence) (e.g., wheat grown at 546–586 ppm CO2 has 5.9–12.7% less protein, 3.7–6.5% less zinc, and 5.2–7.5% less iron). Distributions of pests and diseases will change, affecting production negatively in many regions (high confidence). Given increasing extreme events and interconnectedness, risks of food system disruptions are growing (high confidence). {5.2.3, 5.2.4}
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2023-06-23): Rising levels of atmospheric CO2 do not necessarily cause global warming. Earth’s climate record shows that warming has preceded, not followed, a rise in CO2. According to a study published in Science, measurements of ice core samples showed that over the last four climactic cycles (past 240,000 years), periods of natural global warming preceded global increases in CO2. [117] The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study of the earth’s climate 460-445 million years ago which found that an intense period of glaciation, not warming, occurred when CO2 levels were 5 times higher than they are today. [4] According to ecologist and former Director of Greenpeace International Patrick Moore, PhD, "there is some correlation, but little evidence, to support a direct causal relationship between CO2 and global temperature through the millennia." [60] [...] According to a report from the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University, the increase in human-produced CO2 over the past century has had "little or no significant effect" on global tropical cyclone activity. The report stated that specific hurricanes, including Sandy, Ivan, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, and Ike, were not a direct consequence of human-caused global warming. [89] Between 1995-2015, increased hurricane activity (including Katrina) was recorded; however, according to the NOAA, this was the result of cyclical tropical cyclone patterns driven primarily by natural ocean currents. [125]
Claim: Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, scientists are 90% sure it’s the Sun; The climate problems blamed on carbon dioxide (such as ocean acidification and negative impacts on polar bears) are not real (Willie Soon, 2024-01-22)
Evidence (2023-09-09): Before diving into the specific artifices in the latest paper, a little trip down history lane might be fun to set the context… "It’s the Sun" Solar variability as a potential cause for climate change has a long (and somewhat dubious) history in climate science – going back at least to the poor statistics and over-confident claims of William Herschel (Love,2013). However, the searching for (and finding!) of solar correlations in all manner of climate records (and non-climate records) has been a staple of the ABC (‘Anything-but-CO2‘) crowd since the 1980s. [...] But we have mega-oodles (the SI unit) of additional data that tell us this conclusion cannot be correct. If the sun was driving the warming, we’d see it in the stratospheric temperatures (which are cooling in line with expectations from the impact of CO2, not warming due to the supposed increase in solar activity). If the land data was contaminated by urban heating effects, we wouldn’t see similar warming in the ocean. If the surface temperature data sets were corrupted, why do they line up with the satellite data from the independent AIRS and MSU instruments? Etc.
Claim: “We have been cooling down for the past 4000 years”; the Earth has cooled since the ‘medieval warming’, “It’s all about when you start the measurements” (Ian Plimer, 2023-05-15)
Evidence (2023-05-15): Temperature data indicate that global temperatures are already higher than at any other period in the past several thousand years. Multiple independent lines of evidence indicate that the Earth is currently warming at a rate that is much faster than past changes in climate. Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels due to human activities are a key driver of this change, as has been consistently shown by a consensus of scientific data.
Claim: “We have been cooling down for the past 4000 years”; the Earth has cooled since the ‘medieval warming’, “It’s all about when you start the measurements” (Ian Plimer, 2023-05-15)
Evidence (2024-02-05): For hundreds of thousands of years, the Earth has gone through repeated cycles of warming and cooling. Roughly every hundred thousand years, there has been an ice age,1 driven by changes in the planet’s tilt and orbit that allowed less sunlight to reach the Arctic. Between these ice ages have been periods of warming. The last ice age peaked around 21,000 years ago. This was followed by 10,000 years of warming that brought us to the climate we know now, says David McGee, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. During that time, global temperatures rose by about 6° Celsius (around 11° Fahrenheit). The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere—the main planet-warming greenhouse gas responsible for today’s climate change—rose too, by nearly 50%.
Claim: “We have been cooling down for the past 4000 years”; the Earth has cooled since the ‘medieval warming’, “It’s all about when you start the measurements” (Ian Plimer, 2023-05-15)
Evidence (2023-02-15): This comprehensive assessment concludes that the global average temperature about 6,500 years ago was likely warmer and was followed by a multi-millennial cooling trend that ended in the 1800s. But, they cautioned, uncertainty still exists despite recent studies that claimed to have resolved the conundrum. [...] The challenge up to now has been that our two significant lines of evidence point in opposite directions. Paleo-environmental "proxy" data, which includes evidence from oceans, lakes, and other natural archives, point to a peak global average temperature about 6,500 years ago and then a global cooling trend until humans started burning fossil fuels. Climate models generally show global average temperatures increasing in the last 6,500 years. [...] We also know that, whether the numbers trend up or down, the change in global average temperature in the past 6,500 years has been gradual—probably less than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). This is less than the warming already measured in the last 100 years, most of which humans have caused. However, because global temperature change of any magnitude is significant, especially in response to changing greenhouse gases, knowing whether temperatures were higher or lower 6,500 years ago is important to our knowledge of the climate system and improving forecasts of future climate.
Claim: “We have been cooling down for the past 4000 years”; the Earth has cooled since the ‘medieval warming’, “It’s all about when you start the measurements” (Ian Plimer, 2023-05-15)
Evidence (2020-10-29): Yes. Earth has experienced cold periods (informally referred to as "ice ages," or "glacials") and warm periods ("interglacials") on roughly 100,000-year cycles for at least the last 1 million years. The last of these ice age glaciations peaked* around 20,000 years ago. Over the course of these cycles, global average temperatures warmed or cooled anywhere from 3° to perhaps as much as 8° Celsius (5°-15° Fahrenheit). It was partly through their attempts to understand what caused and ended previous ice ages that climate scientists came to understand the dominant role that carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate system, and the primary role that human-produced carbon dioxide is playing in current global warming. Learn more here and here. Over at least the past million years, glacial and interglacial cycles have been triggered by variations in how much sunlight reaches the Northern Hemisphere in the summer, which are driven by small variations in the geometry of Earth’s axis and its orbit around the Sun. But these fluctuations in sunlight aren’t enough on their own to bring about full-blown ice ages and interglacials. They trigger several feedback loops that amplify the original warming or cooling. During an interglacial, - sea ice and snow retreat, reducing the amount of sunlight the Earth reflects;
Claim: “We have been cooling down for the past 4000 years”; the Earth has cooled since the ‘medieval warming’, “It’s all about when you start the measurements” (Ian Plimer, 2023-05-15)
Evidence (2024-09-19): An ambitious effort to understand the Earth’s climate over the past 485 million years has revealed a history of wild shifts and far hotter temperatures than scientists previously realized — offering a reminder of how much change the planet has already endured and a warning about the unprecedented rate of warming caused by humans.