Governments and research institutions are faking temperature measurements, to make it look like the Earth is warming.  Fact: This claim is completely ludicrous, as it implies that the US government is part of a conspiracy, even with President Trump declaring that global warming is a hoax. If it really were easy for governments to cover up the truth, you would expect the US to have planted weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to justify the 2003 invasion. Instead, it sent 1,500 weapons inspectors to scour the country for WMD, then admitted that no such stockpiles existed. Conspiracy theories are almost never true, particularly in countries where the government is held accountable by voters and the media. [In authoritarian regimes, by contrast, it is a different matter, as the government controls all the levers of power. Even so, the truth still has a way of getting out over time.]

Scientists can’t explain everything about the climate, so we should wait until they can before taking any action.  Fact: Again, this argument is ridiculous. It’s like saying, “Scientists don’t know everything about cancer, so we shouldn’t tell people to stop smoking until they do,” or “We don’t know everything about space, so we shouldn’t launch spaceships until we do.”

In 2005, Professor Tim Flannery said that drought conditions would become permanent in eastern Australia and that “the rain that comes won’t fill our dams”? Neither of these things have happened, so how can anything climate scientists say be taken seriously? Fact: It’s true that Tim Flannery did say those things, and they have not proved to be correct – thus far, at least. The fact is, Tim Flannery is not a climate scientist; he’s a palaeontologist. So, his words do not discredit climate science, any more than would the words of a psychologist or a dermatologist on the same subject. It is unfortunate that he later became the head of the Climate Commission, so was seen as the public face of the climate movement in Australia. While he has been a tireless advocate for climate action in this country, he did not do the movement any favours by saying what he did. Even so, there is good reason to be concerned about the availability and distribution of water in Australia. It’s now becoming clear that climate change is resulting in more droughts and greater flooding. The problem is, it’s proving hard to predict where each of these will occur. What we do know is that neither will be good for the environment or the economy.

Back in the 1970s, scientists predicted that the Earth was going to cool, not warm. That did not happen, so we can’t take scientific predictions about global warming seriously. Fact: Scientists did not predict that the Earth would cool. What happened was that researchers at NASA calculated what would happen if there were a quadrupling of particulate matter in the atmosphere. They predicted that this would block enough sunlight to reduce global temperatures by 3.5°C and trigger another ice age. Of course, this scenario did not occur, as governments introduced legislation in the 1970s to clean up polluting industries. The reason the public became aware of the story was that Time and Newsweek magazines published articles at the time about the possibility of an imminent ice age. Scientists were not wrong in their predictions, as they never made such predictions. This was just a media ‘beat-up’.

In 2026 climate scientists downgraded their worst-case scenario for global warming from 4.5°C to 2.7°C. This proves that their models were flawed from the outset and cannot be relied upon as indicators of where the world is headed. Fact: It’s true that scientists have now downgraded their worst-case scenario for global warming to 2.7°C, but not because their modelling was wrong. Rather, it’s because the rate of increase of greenhouse gas emissions has slowed considerably over the past 10 years, due to rapid technological change and concrete actions on the part of governments.  As recently as a decade ago it looked like fossil fuel use would continue to rise at the same pace as economic growth, leading to a disastrous outcome for the planet. Yet today, the demand for coal, gas and oil is beginning to plateau, thanks to the rapid development of solar, wind and battery storage, as well as the proliferation of electric vehicles. Back then it was also impossible to imagine the extent to which nations would act to cut their emissions. This was particularly so with China, the world’s biggest polluter, which has now become the global leader in renewable energy. Its emissions were expected to rise until at least 2030 but stabilised in 2024 and have now started to fall.  Little wonder then that the world is no longer on the trajectory predicted by the scientific community 20 years ago. Of course, this is not to say that we are to be spared the ravages of global warming. A temperature increase of 2.7°C is still going to cause serious problems for the world, but it’s not the doomsday outcome that was once feared.

So-called ‘experts’ have made ‘doomsday’ predictions in the past, and these have not come to pass. Examples include the likelihood that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation, the notion that the ‘millennium bug’ would disable computers and the fear that the nuclear arms race would lead to nuclear holocaust. Predictions about climate change will prove no different. Fact: This is faulty logic. The fact that one threat doesn’t come true doesn’t mean that others won’t. The coronavirus pandemic is an excellent example. Many prominent climate sceptics also denied the seriousness of the pandemic when it first emerged. Some of those people still don’t take it seriously.  Climate models have been amazingly accurate over the years. In 1906, Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius estimated that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would result in global surface warming of about 4°C. That is amazingly close to modern day predictions – and Arrhenius had only rudimentary laboratory equipment and a slide rule to do his calculations.  Modern climate models have predicted global warming since the 1960s and have been proven remarkably accurate. In 1967, Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald calculated that a doubling of CO2 would cause about 2.4°C of warming. [Manabe shared the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in this area.] In 1981, James Hansen projected that between 1981 and 2015 the planet would warm by 0.6°, which is just 0.1° more than actual observations. Nobel Prize winner Syukuro Manabe [Source: Wikimedia Commons] In the 1970s, Manabe and Wetherald also predicted that CO2 emissions would cause the lower atmosphere to warm and the upper atmosphere to cool. Another of their predictions was that the Arctic would warm faster than the rest of the planet, in part because of decreased reflectivity due to melting ice. Both these predictions have been confirmed by scientific observation.  In 1989, Roland Stouffer, Syukuro Manabe and Kirk Brian predicted that CO2 emissions would cause the land surface to warm faster than the ocean surface – something which has subsequently proved to be true.  Even in the 1970s, when the climate had not warmed much for two decades, climate scientists were still predicting future warming, due to the physics of CO2. Time would prove them right. The climate pause of the 1950s and ‘60s was found to be due to increased particulate matter in the atmosphere. Once this was reduced by legislative action, global warming resumed. 

Computers can’t predict the weather two weeks ahead with any certainty, so how can they be relied on to predict what the Earth’s climate will be like in future decades?  Fact: This myth makes a false analogy between weather and climate, which are two different things. Weather is the state of the atmosphere at a given point in time. It covers temperature, cloud cover, air pressure, wind direction, wind speed, rain and snow. Climate, by contrast, is the average weather over a long period of time. It’s true that we can’t predict the weather more than a week in advance, but we can predict what average temperatures will likely be decades into the future, given the basic laws of physics.

Climate models used by scientists are at best imperfect, and cannot be used to predict future warming. Fact: Climate models are imperfect, as is our knowledge of the solar system, of cancer, of economics, and of many other things. No models of the real world are ever perfect, but that shouldn’t stop us from using them. Global climate models are very useful tools. As early as 1906, Svante Arrhenius was able to predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would result in a 4°C increase in global temperatures. Climate models have improved dramatically since then and have proven remarkably accurate in their predictions. [See the next myth.]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s own figures show that the Earth has warmed far less than 1.3°C.  Fact: This view has arisen due to the fact that the IPCC’s temperature figures are averages and contain a significant margin of error. That margin of error is estimated to be 0.2°C above or below the stated figure of 1.3°C. While this does indeed mean that the Earth’s temperature could have risen by only 1.1°C since the second half of the 19th century, it also means it could have risen by as much as 1.5°C. In other words, it’s possible the situation is not quite as bad as we fear (albeit still bad!); but it’s also possible that it’s worse. Climate sceptics are happy to assume that the official figure is an overestimation but shirk from the possibility that it is actually the opposite. The most reliable figure we have is the one officially used by the IPCC – the global average.

If global warming is real, how could there still be record cold days? And how did the eastern United States experience a record cold snap in 2012-13? Surely there would be no such records in a warming climate. Fact: Global warming doesn’t mean there are no very cold days, just fewer of them. Weather reports in the US and Australia over the last 60 years show that the number of hot and cold records were about equal during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Then the number of heat records started to increase and the number of cold records started to fall. Today, there are now almost twice as many hot records as cold ones.  Extreme weather bell curve [Source: Climate Commission] As for the record US cold snap in 2012-13, it was caused by changes in the Earth’s climate. Temperature increases in the Arctic have been causing movements in the jet stream – the band of strong winds near the top of the troposphere, about 10 km above the Earth’s surface. The jet stream acts like a barrier to the southward movement of frigid arctic air. In 2012, the jet stream moved south in a wave-like formation (known as the Wavy Jet Stream), taking cold Arctic weather with it. This is what produced the cold snap in the eastern US. At the same time, the western US experienced a terrible drought.