Off the top of my head:

I'm with the 97% of scientists who agree it's happening (duh) and that man is probably contributing. There are a LOT of branched distinctions and decisions downstream from that broad statement.

It was the first scientific subject in my lifetime to be declared settled when in fact there was and is quite a bit to research and debate on the subject. The first subject on which credible voices were shouted down or waved away with ad hominem. Sadly, it was not the last, and the lessons about persuasion seem to have been lost.

There's an odd and frustrating lack of discussion about what the baseline climate change would be if man never existed.

Given that we're twenty years into this wildly unproductive dialogue, shouldn't there be more discussion of how to live/deal with it?

We're not going to 'stop' climate change (nor should we wish to), so what exactly does success look like?

There is this kind of milling around that grates me to no end. The climate is changing faster and in a way that we undeniably contribute to and people still are like “hang on a minute there’s a bunch of research to do here”! It’s like if I went to the doctor, they find out I have a cancer, then the doctor says “wait up let’s see how quickly it is actually growing”.

Yes there is no strong evidence about “baseline climate change” but whatever is going on now is 1. Undeniably orders of magnitude faster than any core sample record of climate change 2. Undeniably spurned on by the huge amount of carbon we have been burning And yet reducing carbon output is not a priority.

This is more a comment than a response to your comment, so please don’t take it as an argument. You just reminded me about this particular bit. It just kills me that people who sometimes are otherwise willing to do a lot in terms of charity hit climate change and all of a sudden start questioning that it is a thing. I can’t believe that a genuine existential threat was politicised. You’re right about it all though, representatives not being persuasive, perhaps framing the problem poorly.

Lastly, in recent years we have seen progress thanks to renewables. It’s all because fossil fuel costs are increasing while renewables decreased. Economic incentives would absolutely have worked at the expense of the fossil fuel industry. I wonder how differently things could have gone

In my (uninformed) opinion, if we had adopted nuclear power in the 70s and 80s, we wouldn't be in this mess. We would have significantly decreased our CO2 emissions until renewables were ready to take over.

Thank you--I largely agree with you, particularly on the frustration of unproductive dialogue.

I wonder if we should just remove science from the equation. Let's focus on the fact that group A wants to act on climate change while group B does not. It's just a difference in value preferences.

At root, this is a political problem and it needs a political answer. If group A wants to act on climate change but group B will not vote for it, then there must be some trade-off or some exchange in which both groups benefit. Maybe group B would rather act on gun violence, or group B would rather lower taxes--it doesn't matter. But the whole purpose of having professional politicians is so that they resolve these political problems.