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12 Questions for Climate Change Skeptics: 1. Scientists have been writing peer-reviewed papers for five decades. To believe that any politician today is pushing a climate-change scam would mean they had to start this massive hoax five decades ago—well before the renewable energy industry was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. What was the motivation 5 decades ago? 2. Climate scientists from all scientific disciplines have peer-reviewed studies that are in alignment. This would have to be a supermassive hoax without even one memo as evidence. Not one in five decades. How did they coordinate this spectacularly massive hoax without even a memo passed between them? 3. Not one scientific paper has passed peer review in five decades claiming climate change is a hoax. We’re often told it’s easy to make a study say whatever you want—yet somehow no one can get even one peer-reviewed paper to say climate change isn’t real. How do the perpetrators of this plot prevent scientific journals over 5 decades from publishing science that seems to be all over the internet? 4. Koch Industries paid scientists for an independent study, and it came back confirming that climate change is real. If scientist follow the money? Why can’t the oil industry get their own scientists to say climate change is a hoax? 5. Lawsuits against the oil industry show how they pay for disinformation. Why did they spend $1.4 billion on Republican campaigns since 1990—82% more than on Democrats? Why didn’t they spend $1.4 billion paying scientists to prove climate change wrong if that’s what they believed? 6. Climate skeptics often point to local and short-term weather patterns to dispute the evidence. Your hometown isn’t the globe. What happened this year isn’t a trend measured over hundreds of thousands of years. Why isn’t this proof we are fed half-truths from oil-industry think tanks? 7. Why are all countries on board with human-caused global warming and the response to it—especially if this was supposedly the idea of an American politician who wasn’t even in power five decades ago? 8. The average scientific paper that passes peer review in a respected journal costs about $100,000. The total cost of the 88,000 papers that have already passed peer review confirming that global warming is real, man-made, and happening faster than life can evolve would be roughly one trillion dollars. Who paid that trillion dollars—especially the early studies, when there was no renewable industry to fund them? 9. Scientific journals make their money from scientist subscriptions. What scientist would pay for a subscription if they knew the journal published fake science? And what’s in it for the “peers”? Every paper is reviewed by multiple experts who evaluate the hypothesis before publication. Why is proving a hoax on this one topic worth destroying a reputable journals reputation when they cover a massive amount of other science? 10. Every paper involves several scientists. Add in the peer reviewers, and we’re talking about a monumental conspiracy spanning five decades and every scientific discipline. How did this conspiracy grow so large? There doesn’t seem to be any physical evidence like phone call records or memos as they would have been brought up in lawsuits against the oil industry. How did they communicate all over the world so secretly? 11. If climate change is real, wouldn’t people be alarmist? There certainly would be something to be alarmed about. Why is that somehow evidence it’s not real? 12. And here’s the big question: what would have changed if global warming wasn’t a hoax? Wouldn’t the same people building renewables still be making money anyway? Skeptics often point to China or renewable companies as the perpetrators of this massive conspiracy—but in their minds, what would have happened if climate change were real? Would people build solar farms for free? What about wind farmers or others in the renewable industry? Would China give us renewables for free? If it were true, wouldn’t we want renewable companies to make money so more players jump in and save the planet? [Edit - I will be adding questions as they come up] 13. If the climate was always going to get this hot naturally, why didn’t anyone write a paper before temperatures rose? Why isn’t this reverse engineering after the fact to explain the rise in global temperature over time? I could go on. These are just some points that require basic critical thinking.