Time to bust the myths about climate change!

6 MYTHS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

With the climate crisis becoming a hot topic in mainstream media - there's a lot of confusion around what climate change actually is. That's why we've tried to clear up some of the most frequently heard myths, so that you can tell fiction from fact!

MYTH 1: THE EARTH’S CLIMATE HAS ALWAYS CHANGED

Over the course of the Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, the climate has changed a lot. This is true. But the rapid warming we’re seeing now can't be explained by natural cycles of warming and cooling. The kind of changes that would normally happen over hundreds of thousands of years are happening in decades. Global temperatures are now at their highest since records began. In fact, 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have all taken place since 2001.

This much faster warming corresponds with levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which have been increasing since the industrial revolution. So, when people talk about climate change today, they mean anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. This is the warming of Earth’s average temperature as a result of human activity, such as burning coal, oil and gas to produce energy to fuel our homes and transport and cutting down trees to produce the food we eat.

MYTH 2: PLANTS NEED CARBON DIOXIDE

Plants do need carbon dioxide (CO2) to live. Plants and forests remove and store away huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. But the problem is, there’s only so much carbon dioxide they can absorb and this amount is getting less, as more and more forests are cut down across the world, largely to produce our food.

Let’s be clear, CO2 itself does not cause problems. It's part of the natural global ecosystem. The problem is the quantity of CO2 that’s being produced by us as humans; there hasn’t been this level of CO2 in the atmosphere for 800,000 years.

MYTH 3: GLOBAL WARMING ISN'T REAL AS IT'S STILL COLD