My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses. That link is unfortunately much harder to prove than rising temperatures by itself. The proof is there nonetheless, but it's easier to cast doubt on it, and that's what certain groups have been doing.

I've seen the full-court denial:

- it's not warming, or not significantly

- if it's warming, it's not because of humans, (or)

- if it's warming, it's beneficial

- if it's warming because of humans and that's bad, there's nothing we can do about it

ETA: honorary mention for "what about China?"

People I've argued about this with will switch interchangeably between these. Press them hard enough on one issue, and they'll just switch to another. It's a game of whack-a-mole.

But POTUS 5 months ago:

"If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can't miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."

https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-...

I didn't even think the link to greenhouse gases is denied any more.

The merchants of doubt ran out the clock and what I hear from the former deniers I know is that it is too expensive and too late to do anything now, being warmer will be nicer, and CO2 is a fertilizer.

A friend of mine says he was convinced by https://xkcd.com/1732/

Even the qualification "in the last 10,000" years gives the doubters something else to dismiss global warming.

There are people that believe the warming, but don't believe it matters because the Earth used to be much hotter at some point in the past so it is a natural cycle. Yet they fail to realize that humans didn't exist then so there is no good reason to believe an Earth that hot can support human life.

>> My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses.

I fall in that category. My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. I saw the blue skys after 9/11. I read the NASA guys that said daily temperature range increased measurably. I saw the blue skys again during Covid19.

I'm also of the opinion that anyone looking at historical data only going back 200,000 years or less is missing the larger picture. Sea levels are NOT at historic highs, we should expect them to rise further before receeding. We should expect glaciation again if we don't do anything, but speeding up warming IMHO is more likely to trigger glaciation that to "push through" whatever causes it and break the cycle (which would be a good thing).

So as a long-term thinker all this hype is just that. If you don't have a plan to end the glacier cycle you're just making a big deal out of a small change in time-scale due to reasons (CO2 vs H2O) that may well be the wrong ones.