We know you're a blinkered denier, but we also know what we can see with our own eyes.
The first prediction that CO2 might increase temperatures came around 1900 when Svante Arrhenius performed the basic calculations that described the increase in temperature you might see from CO2 increases. But back then the change was so tiny that it wasn't an immediate problem. In 1912, for example, a Popular Mechanics article said that the burning of coal might cause warming through CO2 releases, and "the effect may be considerable in a few centuries."
In the 1950's, when London coal smogs were killing thousands, scientists like Keeling and Revelle started raising the alarm, warning that the ocean would not magically absorb all the CO2 we were generating - and that there was a cost to all the coal burning beyond hundreds of thousands of deaths from coal pollution.
It became a widespread issue in the scientific community in 1988 when the risk was first discussed at the Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, the first time that a scientific consensus began to emerge on what increasing CO2 production might result in.
But during all that time there wasn't much warming, so it was easy for the average person to ignore the research and the threat. It was even easier for deniers to deny it was happening, since the changes were so small.
In 1998 we saw one of the first really anomolaus warm years, but again, since it was one year deniers could say "it was one year! That's it!" One famous article claimed "there's only one problem with global warming - it ended in 1998!"
But since then it has become harder and harder to deny. That exceptionally warm year that deniers claimed was an extreme outlier is no longer even in the top ten warmest years. The 1998 record was broken in 2010, and 2014, and 2016, and 2023 by larger and larger amounts each time. The anomaly is now over 1 degree C, a threshold that deniers formerly claimed we'd never approach.
Today people see climate change with their own eyes in massive wildfires driven by drought and warmer temperatures, shorter growing seasons, loss of land due to erosion and sea level rise and heatwaves that are becoming increasingly dangerous to human life. Deniers can no longer make two of their favorite arguments - "the climate's not warming, stupid!" and "OK so it's warming, so what?" The only angle they have left is "the climate's warming but we're not doing it, stupid!" and they have been playing that for all it's been worth. During this time they've been heavily bankrolled by the oil companies to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about climate change, exactly the same way (and often using the same people) as tobacco companies did in the 1950s to make cigarettes appear safe.
However, it's becoming harder and harder to fool most of the people most of the time. With more and more revelations about the fossil fuel money behind the denial movement, it's becoming clear to even the most conservative people out there that there's a truth that oil companies don't want people to see. In court oil companies are now admitting that CO2 causes warming, but also saying that the way to fight it is to tax people to build CO2 scrubbers - not to simply find alternatives to oil and coal. That sudden change in direction is revealing to many people. Another recent trial revealed that Exxon-Mobil has had a good estimate as to how much warming fossil fuel burning would cause, and has had it for the past 40 years - and it's been fairly accurate, even as they deny it's happening.
As we go into the future the denier movement will not go away; there is simply too much money (hundreds of billions in profit every year) that people very much want in their pockets. And climate change denial puts that money in their pockets at the expense of the poor who suffer the storms, droughts, famines and loss of land that climate change results in; as always, sh!t rolls downhill. Fortunately the science is now being taken more seriously by most people, and we are starting to work on alternatives. There's a long way to go of course - but it's a start.
Just out of curiosity, did/do you go to MIT and live on 5E at East Campus?
