1. It’s too late for us to make any difference, the planet is beyond repair
Infact, now is the time to act! We have a short period of a few years to make a real difference in cutting our CO2 emissions. It is the responsibility of every individual, every organisation, every business and every government to take every action available to them and more in the fight against climate change. We have only one planet, and every one of us can help to save it, but we must drive the change, no one else is going to do it for us. We simply cannot wait until it really is too late.
Take Action
You can use our emissions calculators to work out and offset your impact on climate change today.
2. Nothing I do as an individual will have a real impact on tackling change
There are actually many ways an individual can have an impact on the advance of global warming, everything you do to reduce your emissions will count. From big decisions such as not to take holidays requiring air travel, that have a significant impact of reducing emissions, right down to changing the lights in your home to efficient bulbs (when the current ones expire); you can very quickly reduce your carbon footprint. It will require action on the individual level to make the impact we urgently need on a global level. And don’t forget, as each individual adopts these lifestyle changes it contributes to a growing movement of consumer and political pressure – the one thing businesses and governments can never afford to ignore.
3. People exaggerate the scale of the situation and there is actually no need for urgent action
The exact timing of climate change is yet to be determined, however the key point to note is that scientists now agree that the world’s temperature will increase by 2 or 3 degrees this century, resulting in temperatures and climate change that will be difficult for many people and ecosystems to adapt to. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the world's leading authority on climate change – has suggested that as climate change progresses it is likely that negative effects would begin to dominate almost everywhere. The sooner we do something, the more likely we will be able to avoid the worse case scenarios.
4. Climate change is nothing to do with humans
It is true that the world has experienced warmer and colder periods in the past without any interference from humans. The ice ages are well-known examples of global changes to the climate. But even taking all the natural effects into account we cannot explain the temperature rises that we have seen over the last 100 years both on land and in the oceans without factoring in the actions of humans.
We know from looking at gases found trapped in cores of polar ice that the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are now 35 per cent greater than they have been for at least the last 650,000 years. This is mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels, as well as the production of cement and the widespread burning of the world's forests. The increase in global temperature is consistent with the level of increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
5. Forecasts of temperatures decades into the future are unreliable
We have to look at the changes we are seeing in the earth’s natural landscape and climate now, as well as using modern climate models (which are becoming increasingly more sophisticated) to forecast. They are based on our understanding of basic scientific principles, observations of the climate and our understanding of how it functions.
Although climate models are not sufficiently well-developed to project accurately all the detail of the impacts we might see at regional or local levels, they are able to reproduce past and present changes in the global climate rather well, providing us with a reliable guide to the direction of future climate change.
6. Warming is a result of solar system effects
The sun is producing more sunspots than it did in the early nineteenth century, but it represents only a tiny amount of the overall energy that the earth gets from the sun. Sunspot activity only accounts for a 0.1% change in an 11 year cycle. According to the 2007 report from the IPCC, the solar output has increased by no more that 0.12% since the ‘Little Ice Age’ chill of 1750.
While there is evidence of a link between solar activity and some of the warming in the early 20th Century, measurements from satellites show that there has been very little change in underlying solar activity in the last 30 years. There is even evidence of a detectable decline and so this cannot account for the recent rises we have seen in global temperatures. The IPCC report deemed it 90% certain that greenhouse gasses have more influence than solar activity on climate change.