List of climate change controversies

The list of climate change controversies (or list of global warming controversies) concerns past or present public debates over certain aspects of climate change: whether it is occurring (climate change deniers dispute this), how much has occurred in modern times, what has caused it, what its effects will be, whether action should be taken to curb it now or later, and so forth. In the scientific literature, there is a very strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases.^[1]

The controversies are, by now, mostly political rather than scientific: there is a scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is caused by human activity.

There have been many debates around the details of climate change science.

• History of climate change science#Discredited theories and reconciled apparent discrepancies
• Climate change denial#Discussing specific aspects of climate change science
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change#Challenges and controversies (the IPCC assessment reports, like the most recent IPCC Sixth Assessment Report summarise the state of the art of climate science at the time).

Debates over most effective response to warming

There have been debates on the best responses to slow global warming, and their timing. The debates are around the specific actions for climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation, or climate action in general. See for example:

• Economic analysis of climate change
• Climate change denial#Delaying climate change mitigation measures
• Climate change denial#Over reliance on adaptation only
• Climate action

See also