- Position‹2 of 5›
- Climate change is natural and unharmful
- Argument1 of 2›
Climate change is part of a natural cycle
Historical documents suggest there was a Medieval Warm Period followed by Little Ice Age. Some believe that we are coming out of an ice age and reentering a natural warm period.
The argument
Climate change is natural and inevitable. It has been recorded before, and some evidence shows that we may be entering a natural warm period, explaining global warming.
Premises
Counter-arguments
While the climate does naturally change, the past few decades have shown a disproportionate acceleration in this change, and evidence has shown that this acceleration is due to human activity.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Natural cycles operate over tens of thousands of years and through known drivers — orbital variation, solar output, volcanic activity — none of which accounts for the warming observed since the mid-twentieth century. [Rejecting P2] The evidence points the other way: the present rate of warming is roughly an order of magnitude faster than post-glacial natural warming, the stratosphere is cooling while the surface warms, which is the signature of greenhouse forcing rather than of solar change, and the medieval warm interval the slug invokes was regional rather than global. [Rejecting C] Even were the warming natural in origin, that would not make it unharmful — the harm follows from the rate and magnitude of the change rather than from its cause.