[metalic]

Climate change is what the scientists call what is happening to the Earth's climate - generally warming and with increased examples of extreme weather, such as higher highs, lower lows, more droughts and more floods.

Global warming is what climate change deniers call what is happening, so that they can point to a few places that are cooler and claim that since not everywhere is warming then the scientists must be lying.

Scientists stopped using the term "Global Warming" 15 years ago because it was confusing, which is exactly why climate change deniers continue to use it.

Don't be fooled!

Another confusion that climate change deniers like to use in their arguments is to look at weather rather than climate.

Weather changes from day to day and is to be expected. When climate - the long term pattern of pattern - changes it is a cause for concern.

If a particular day is cooler than the same day last year then that comes as no surprise. If it has been getting warmer every year for most of the past 20 years then attention needs to be paid to it and an explanation sought. That explanation is climate change.

Don't be fooled!

The vast majority of scientists (not the 97% quoted in some articles, but over 80%) believe that the significant changes in climate since industrialization has largely been caused by us.

Why would so many intelligent people believe something if it were not true? Their scientific work relies on proof and evidence, so they are unlikely to believe something unless they have both of these. Climate change deniers have failed to come with a valid reason why 80+% of scientists have been fooled or are lying.

One reason they give is that by claiming there is rapid climate change scientists can get increased funding for their work on climate change. However, the vast majority of these scientists are NOT working in the field of climate change so would not end up with increased funding. Exactly the opposite - there is a relatively fixed pot of funds available to finance scientific research, so if you support spending more on climate change research you are leaving less funding for your field of research.

Don't be fooled!

One lazy tactic of climate change deniers is to spout facts without checking. A recent one was that volcanic activity produces more carbon dioxide than human activity. It is actually about 1% - something which is very easy to check just by visiting any one of the reliable sites you can find through a search on the internet. Of course, you may stumble upon a site that claims that just one volcano produces more carbon dioxide than the total that humans have over millennia, the invalidity of which should be obvious to anyone.

Another is to keep referring to "data" from forty years ago as if it were newly released. Science has come a long way since the 1980's. Our measurements are much more accurate. We can glean a lot of information from space, looking back at Earth. Ice samples going back thousands of years have shown that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has remained relatively stable until the start of industrialization in the late eighteenth century, since which it has increased by 50%. There have been similar increases (and decreases) in the distant past but these took around 10,000 years, not less than 250 years.

Don't be fooled!