Aside from that, the argument got bogged down in bullshit, and not just bullshit from the right wing’s paid climate denial hucksters. The notion that climate science is “settled” is only true on the broad brush level; indeed, “greenhouse” (Tyndall Effect) gases trap more of the sun’s energy. We are pumping a lot of those gases into the air and some, such as CO2, stay in the system for a long time. The piper will eventually have to be paid. How that plays out as far as cause and effect are in the details.

Actual details about climate sensitivity and quantitative modelling of future change is tough and ongoing. Meanwhile, alarmist notions that climate change was responsible for the latest hurricane clashed with real world scientific observations that these changes occur on a century to millennia time scale. We are barely out of the signal to noise part of the picture, if we are at all.

Basically, to the average citizen rather than the climate modeller or dedicated activist, there is no sense of urgency. Climate change is not giving we Americans people dying in the streets. Yet. Contrast that with watching the Cuyahoga River burn, smog so thick you could cut it with a knife, or sewage flowing in the local creek — observations we old farts actually made in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Those were direct and tangible observations of harm that rose people from their environmental slumber.

It took a generation to convince people that smoking was harmful to you in part because the cancer can take decades to develop. Likewise, we need to do better on climate change because it will take a century or more to see changes that we are postulating today. I don’t know if changes in how we think about climate can be done with advertising or listening to politicians. I think we need to re-infuse the public with a trust in the scientific method. That will take work by both the public and by scientists and their spokespeople.

Finally, what we do about it may well combine efforts at regulation with efforts at engineered mitigation. Part of the left’s problem is that everything is a regulatory problem. But much of our progress in the last half century of pollution abatement came from a combination of regulatory-driven innovation. Cars are very clean, even though we have more of them. Fracking has replaced coal with cleaner burning natural gas. New nuclear reactor designs, if allowed to develop, are intrinsically safe. Solar and wind generation, if combined with new technology of storage and transmission, can be great. The big joker in the dice is human population and everyone wanting the good life.