What to say to a climate change skeptic

As global warming getting more and more serious, the global climate system becomes more and more unstable. The rising global temperature also causes biodiversity loss. According to many scientific studies that have been published,  global warming, which is affecting the whole Earth system, is very likely to be caused by anthropogenic force. Although there are many scientific studies support that the climate change we are experiencing is very likely to be caused by human activities, only about 48% of US citizens think that climate change is caused by human activities. The other 31% of the citizens believe that it is caused by nature forces, while the other 20% of people think that there is no evidence about global warming. On the other hand, about 97% of climate scientists believe that global warming is happening and is caused by human activities. Comparing these two results, we can find that there is a huge gap. In my opinion, the main reason that causes this big difference is the lack of the knowledge about environmental science. The lack of knowledge leads to the misconceptions that make people deny the idea that climate change is caused by the human force.

One of the misconceptions that people have about climate change is that scientists do not agree that climate change is real. As I mentioned in the last paragraph, about 97% of the climate scientists agree that climate change is real and is caused by human activities. Therefore, the idea that scientists do not agree that climate change is real can be eliminated immediately.

The second misconception about climate change that some people have is that scientists are exaggerating the issue. To disagree this concept, we can simply introduce a fact that all of the scientific studies require critical reviews from peers and competitors, making it hard to fake result. In addition to that, a major factor that elevates a scientist's scientific career is the quantity and the quality of the scientific studies he or she publishes. Faking the result and make people believe that climate change is caused by human activities does not bring any benefit to one's scientific career. If anyone can be called a winner, that would be renewable energy companies. However, renewable energy companies rarely hire climate scientists.

The other common misconception is that climate change can't be a serious issue because some places are still very cold. We can't argue that some places on the Earth are still extremely cold, but we also can't argue that the average temperature of the Earth is rising. It is possible that some places can experience extremely cold winter when global warming is happening. When some places are having cold weather, people in other places may be cooking eggs on the sidewalk. Many day-to-day heat records were set in 2014 and 2015 even given the winter storm in the US.

The last, and probably the biggest, misconception I want to talk about is that climate change is not caused by human activities. Many people argue that carbon dioxide emission due to human activities is very small compared to the emission from the volcanos. It is true that the carbon dioxide emission from nature sources is much greater than the human-caused emission. However, when we investigate the concentration of CO2 in the Earth's history, we can find that the natural CO2 emission and absorption has maintained a balance for 45 billion years, and the usage of the fossil fuel and deforestation is breaking this balance, causing the concentration of CO2 and global temperature to rise.

Even given many scientific studies which show that humans are causing global warming, there are still many people in the US are not aware of the human-caused climate change. It shows that more environmental education is needed in the US. Citizens in the US need more access and expose of environmental knowledge so that people in the US will care more about environmental issues. When people care, they will be more likely to support any policy that fights against climate change.