I have a business colleague who is a climate change skeptic. Here's a set of resource to address this skepticism
- https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/16/qa-brian-cox-brings-graphs-malcolm-roberts - Cox produced a graph of global surface temperatures of the past century and immediately debunked the myth, pointing out it is a misunderstanding caused by looking at a small sample, starting from an unusually warm year two decades ago.
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/if-carbon-dioxide-makes-u/ - The heating effect of extra carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and many other minor gases can be calculated with confidence based on the absorption properties that have been measured carefully in the laboratory. Currently, the total heating produced by the increases of all long-lived greenhouse gases (excluding water vapor) since preindustrial times is equal to about 1 percent of all solar radiation absorbed at the surface. The effect would be somewhat similar if the sun had started to shine 1 percent more brightly during the 20th century.
- https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide - The global average atmospheric carbon dioxide in 2017 was 405.0 parts per million (ppm for short), with a range of uncertainty of plus or minus 0.1 ppm. Carbon dioxide levels today are higher than at any point in at least the past 800,000 years.
- https://skepticalscience.com/climate-skeptics-are-like-galileo.htm Some climate change skeptics compare themselves to Galileo, who in the early 17thcentury challenged the Church’s view that the sun revolves around the earth and was later vindicated.
The comparison to Galileo is not only flawed; the very opposite is true. - https://climatechangeconnection.org/science/what-about-lag-time/ - The progression of an ice age, as well as the retreat of an ice age, is helped along by various feedback processes. Although the increase in temperature occurs prior to an increase in carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide plays an important role in the retreat of an ice age. As carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, the greenhouse effect is strengthened, and a greater degree of warming occurs.
- https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm - CO2 lags only for a small portion of global warming. 90% of the glacial-interglacial warming occurred after that atmospheric CO2 increase
- https://phys.org/news/2012-07-temperatures-co2-climate.html - The greatest climate change the world has seen in the last 100,000 years was the transition from the ice age to the warm interglacial period. New research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen indicates that, contrary to the previous opinion, the rise in temperature and the rise in the atmospheric CO2 follow each other closely in terms of time.
- https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/temperature-change - One of the most remarkable aspects of the paleoclimate record is the strong correspondence between temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere observed during the glacial cycles of the past several hundred thousand years. When the carbon dioxide concentration goes up, the temperature goes up. When the carbon dioxide concentration goes down, the temperature goes down. A small part of the correspondence is due to the relationship between temperature and the solubility of carbon dioxide in the surface ocean, but the majority of the correspondence is consistent with a feedback between carbon dioxide and climate. These changes are expected if Earth is in radiative balance, and they are consistent with the role of greenhouse gases in climate change. While it might seem simple to determine cause and effect between carbon dioxide and climate from which change occurs first, or from some other means, the determination of cause and effect remains exceedingly difficult. Furthermore, other changes are involved in the glacial climate, including altered vegetation, land surface characteristics, and ice-sheet extent.
- https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/12/co2-in-the-atmosphere-just-exceeded-415-parts-per-million-for-the-first-time-in-human-history/ - For the first time in human history — not recorded history, but since humans have existed on Earth — carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has topped 415 parts per million, reaching 415.26 parts per million, according to sensors at the Mauna Loa Observatory, a research outpost of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency
- https://theconversation.com/surveying-archaeologists-across-the-globe-reveals-deeper-and-more-widespread-roots-of-the-human-age-the-anthropocene-122008 — survey of archaeologists across the globe reveals deeper and more widespread roots of the human age
- https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-our-intuition-about-sea-level-rise-is-wrong?utm_source=twtrsynd&utm_medium=social — it’s more than just melting ice and sea-level rise.
- There’s a letter claiming climate change is a hoax, here’s the counter https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/letter-signed-by-500-scientists-relies-on-inaccurate-claims-about-climate-science/
