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FalseScienceLast updated: July 10, 2026

Climate Change Is Not Caused by Human Activity

Candace Owens consistently questions or denies the causal role of human activity in climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes with greater than 95% confidence that human activity is the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century.

Written by Iggy Pomp · Reviewed by Igor Pomper · Last updated July 10, 2026

What we know

Commentator Candace Owens has repeatedly questioned whether human-caused climate change is real, suggested that climate science is driven by political and financial incentives rather than evidence, and downplayed the scientific consensus on the topic in various media appearances and social media posts.

The scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is one of the most thoroughly documented in modern science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report, published in 2021 and drawing on thousands of peer-reviewed studies contributed by scientists from more than 60 countries, concluded it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, with high confidence attributing the vast majority of observed warming since 1850 to greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. NASA and NOAA both independently confirm, using satellite and surface temperature records going back over a century, that global average temperature has risen by more than 1.1 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial era, with the last decade being the warmest on record.

Multiple independent analyses of the peer-reviewed literature, including a widely cited 2013 study in Environmental Research Letters examining nearly 12,000 climate papers, found that among studies taking a position on the cause of warming, more than 97% attributed it primarily to human activity. This consensus figure has been checked and replicated by several subsequent studies using different methodologies, including analyses of climate scientist surveys and citation networks, consistently landing in the same range.

Owens has specifically suggested that scientists and institutions promote climate change concern for funding and political reasons. This claim runs into a basic asymmetry: fossil fuel industry funding for climate science denial and lobbying has been documented in extensive detail, including through internal industry documents released during litigation showing companies like ExxonMobil had accurate internal climate projections as early as the 1970s while publicly funding efforts to sow doubt, a pattern documented by Harvard researchers analyzing the company's own internal records. No comparable body of evidence supports a parallel claim that mainstream climate science is financially motivated in the opposite direction.

Climate scientists distinguish between legitimate scientific debate, which continues over specific magnitudes, regional impacts, and policy responses, and denial of the basic physical mechanism and observed warming trend, which is not seriously contested within the field. Owens's commentary falls into the second category, questioning whether warming is occurring or human-caused, rather than engaging with the genuine open questions climate scientists themselves debate, such as exact sensitivity ranges or regional precipitation projections.

Owens has also pointed to natural climate variability across Earth's geological history, including past ice ages and warm periods, as evidence that current warming is part of a normal cycle rather than human-caused. Climate scientists agree that natural cycles exist and have studied them extensively using ice cores, tree rings, and sediment records, but these same paleoclimate records are part of the evidence base showing that the rate and cause of current warming, tied to measurable increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion, is distinct from prior natural cycles, which were driven by different mechanisms such as orbital changes occurring over tens of thousands of years rather than the decades-scale warming observed since industrialization.

Common claims

  • Climate change is not caused by human activity.False - the IPCC states >95% confidence in the opposite conclusion
  • The scientific consensus on climate change is disputed.False - 97–99% of climate scientists agree on the anthropogenic cause
  • The Earth may be cooling rather than warming.False - every decade since the 1980s has been warmer than the one before

Evidence hierarchy

01IPCC Sixth Assessment ReportIPCC AR6 concludes with >95% confidence that human activity is the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century.

All sources

Related terms

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