Twelve Urban Myths of Climate Change 1.Global warming is happening.” No: According to the RSS satellite record, there has been none for 17 years 10 months. 2.Warming is faster than we thought.” No: In 1990 the climate models predicted that global warming would happen twice as fast as it has. 3.There’s a 97 percent consensus.” No: Only 0.5 percent of the authors of 11,944 scientific papers on climate and related topics over the past 21 years said they agreed that most of the warming since 1950 was man-made. 4.Droughts are getting worse.” No: A recent paper in the learned journals shows the fraction of the world’s land under drought has fallen for 30 years. 5.Floods are getting worse.” No: The U.N.’s panel has said in two recent reports that there has been no particular change in the frequency or severity of floods worldwide. 6.Sea ice is melting.” No: It has grown to a new record high in the Antarctic, though the Arctic icecap has been shrinking a little in summer. 7.Sea level is rising dangerously.” No: Some satellites show it as rising a little, while others show it as falling. 8.Hurricanes are getting worse.” No: Their combined frequency, severity and duration has been at or near the lowest in the 35-year satellite record. 9.Global warming caused recent extreme weather.” No: There has been no warming recently, so it cannot have caused any extreme weather in recent years. 10.Global warming will reduce the number of redheads.” No: This is one of many scare stories about imaginary effects of warmer weather. 11.The ocean is acidifying.” No: The ocean remains decidedly alkaline, and there cannot be much change in its acid-base balance because it is buffered by the basalt rocks in which it lies. 12.It’s cheaper to act now, just in case.” No: It is 10-100 times costlier to try to prevent global warming today than to let it happen and pay the cost of adapting to it the day after tomorrow.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 08:50:17 +0000
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