A severe drought in Monterrey, Mexico; deaths after a fracture of the Marmolada glacier in Italy; an upcoming heat wave in Europe: This is just a short list of the growing number of natural phenomena that climate activists see as obvious evidence that our world is warming rapidly.
But there are still some people around the world who deny climate change. According to YouGov study from 2022 which included 2,059 German participants, 5% do not believe in global warming. In the US, according to a YouGov study of June 2022 with 1,487 respondents, 9% do not believe in climate change and 23% are not sure if it exists.
And the number of climate skeptics has increased: In July 2021only 6% of the 1,496 respondents did not believe in climate change, while 15% were unsure.
The city of Monterrey, in northern Mexico, has been affected by a severe drought for months, as evidenced by the almost dry Boca reservoir.
Klaus Oberauer, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Zurich, told DW that it does not depend on the level of education whether or not someone believes in climate change. He calls climate change denial a “sophisticated political strategy”: people define a scientific issue in terms of a particular worldview to identify with a certain political orientation.
However, the question of whether climate change exists is not a matter of feelings or a certain worldview, but of fact. This fact check aims to provide them.
Claim: “There is no global warming, there is no climate change,”a user writes on Twitter (filed here) — and publishes a CNN interview with meteorologist John Coleman, the co-founder of the Weather Channel. In the interview, he denies that global warming exists.
DW Fact Check: false
The video was shown on television in 2014. The Weather Channel clearly distanced same from Coleman’s statements. According to media reports, the meteorologist died in 2018, but climate deniers continue to refer to him as a living and relevant presence. The tweet’s statement is unproven and contradicts scientific findings.
Is climate change scientifically proven?
Yes, global warming and climate change are scientifically proven, and have been for decades. In fact, researchers have discovered that climate change began more than 180 years ago, at the start of the Industrial Revolution. In Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists from 195 countries He writes that there is increasing evidence of weather extremes, such as heat waves, heavy rainfall, droughts and tropical cyclones. In addition, they found evidence of human influence on global warming.
For its global climate reports, experts analyze tens of thousands of studies. The panel already stated in 1995: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”
In an overviewthe German Climate Consortium (DKK) states that all parts of the climate system, such as the oceans, ice, land, atmosphere and biosphere, have warmed significantly in recent decades and that the air at the surface of the Earth is, on global average, already more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than in the pre-industrial period.
According to the expertsthe goal must be to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. Otherwise climate impacts will be increasingly harmful to humans and the entire planet, sea levels will continue to rise and weather conditions will become more extreme.
“One point five degrees of global warming,” Claas Teichmann, a scientist at Germany’s Climate Services Center, told DW. “That means 1.5 degrees of global average warming, because it tends to warm more on the continents than the ocean, which has some cooling effect due to evaporation.” This means that in many regions, it will not be 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer, but even hotter than that.
Is climate change caused by humans?
Hundreds of research institutions worldwide agree that the current rapid rate of climate change is caused by human activity. A US study analyzed 88,125 climate studies and concluded that 99% of studies agree that humans play an overwhelming role in climate change. With the help of modelsit is possible to simulate how the climate would have developed without anthropogenic influences and how it ultimately developed with these influences.
In 2021, NASA published a study in which researchers used satellite observations of Earth’s radiation to show that today’s rapid climate change is not natural but a product of human activity.
When fossil fuels such as coal, when oil or natural gas is burned, the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is produced. Along with other greenhouse gases, it blocks thermal radiation and causes the Earth to warm. “In 2020, average annual CO2 concentrations were almost 50% higher than before the start of industrialization,” states the website of the German Climate Consortium (DKK).
On July 12, 2022, the global average level of atmospheric CO2 was 417 ppm. The last time CO2 levels were this high was about 3 million years ago, when the sea level was about 30 meters (100 feet) taller and modern humans didn’t even exist. According to the researchers, at that time it was generally much warmer and there was less ice on the planet. DW published a detailed check on human-driven climate change in 2021.
What recent natural disasters can be attributed to climate change?
“For statistical reasons, one cannot conclude from an individual event that there is a global or long-term change in the climate,” Andreas Becker, head of the Climate Monitoring Department of the German Weather Service, told DW. “But we can calculate with probabilities.”
Marie-Luise Beck, managing director of the German Climate Consortium, confirmed this by mail. “Because of climate change, extremes are changing in terms of frequency and intensity, which means extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and stronger,” explains Beck.
According to an international study, the probability of the type of extreme rainfall that caused flooding in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 2021 has increased by a factor of 1.2 to nine.
Still, we’re talking about massive time periods, Becker explains, since the event is still very rare even with climate change. “We’re talking about several hundred years here. Without climate change, these rains would only have occurred every 20,000 years,” says the meteorologist.
Flood disaster in Germany’s Ahr Valley last year killed 134
“The study also shows that the intensity of these extreme rainfall events has increased by 3 to 19 percent due to human-induced global warming in the region.” a statement about the study he says.
The chief meteorologist and climate specialist for the American channel WFLA News, Jeffrey Berardelli, gave DW another example: “More recently, the India-Pakistan spring heat wave that caused the Glacial Lake Outburst flood was 30 times more likely to be caused by climate change.”
verdict
There is almost 100% scientific consensus that the climate is changing, and that humans are responsible. This is associated with an increase in weather extremes that threaten the lives of humans and the entire planet.
Collaboration: Tetyana Klug
Edited by: Timothy Jones
