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Sunday, Sep. 28, 2025

Are humans responsible for climate change?

Sue Bin Park, Skeptical Science
yes

Our rapid burning of fossil fuels has caused a buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas in our atmosphere.

Until we started burning fossil fuels, the CO2 moving between the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and land remained relatively steady for thousands of years. Fossil fuel burning took trapped carbon from the solid Earth, where it had been safely stored for millions of years, and injected it — as CO2 — into our atmosphere.

Humans have emitted more than one trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution — about one-third of atmospheric CO2 today.

The carbon dioxide released by human activity is unique. Certain forms of carbon that are rare in natural CO2 are found in larger amounts in fossil fuels. Because of that, human-generated CO2 has a ‘fingerprint’ that can be detected in air samples.

This CO2 has raised temperatures at a rate not seen in millions of years.

See a full discussion of this at Skeptical Science

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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network.

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Skeptical Science is a non-profit science education organization. Our goal is to remove a roadblock to climate action by building public resilience against climate misinformation. We achieve this by publishing debunking of climate myths as well as providing resources for educators, communicators, scientists, and the general public. Skeptical Science was founded and is led by John Cook, a Senior Research Fellow with the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne.

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