> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now

My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't even believe it. The very tired response is "well i wish it would warm up here slaps knee". Using the phrase 'Climate Change' at least reduces that objection.

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legitster an hour ago | parent | next [-]

My father in law was a massive climate change denier until some trees started dying on his property.

He called out an arborist, and the arborist clearly explained that there wasn't enough rain anymore to support the number of trees on his land, and that the forest was slowly receding as the older/bigger trees took all the water from the other trees.

It finally dawned on him that a place where trees used to happily live to hundreds of years old could no longer support trees.

Still, he thinks CO2 is a con job cooked up by China and that global warming is divine punishment. But it's a good reminder that a lot of denialists are waiting for a personal, practical reason to care.

	▲	Terretta 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> But it's a good reminder that a lot of denialists are waiting for a personal, practical reason to care. Four out of five denialists agree!

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smitty1e 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Climate Change" implies that some sort of "constant climate" is even attainable, irrespective of desirable.

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mithr 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.

Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."

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alt227 an hour ago | parent [-]

Your analogy doesnt work, becaue the earth has been warmer than it is now several times in the past. so the increased temperature is within the range of normal temperatures.

The problem is not that the earth is warming, it is that it is warming at an artificially increased rate.

	▲	larkost 15 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The rate of warming is a problem (i.e.: it determines what generations of humans are going to see this), but the major problem is the warming itself, or rather the change. We (humanity) have gotten comfortable with the way things are, and a change in that is going to mean that things are going to change for us, and we don't like change. Most of our biggest cities are all close to the coast and will be subject to massive flooding in the next 100 years (if not sooner). Much of those same large population centers are also fairly close to being too hot for general survival (without aggressive AC). Our agriculture is all setup for the temperatures we have now, and the rain patterns we are used to. So we are going to have to change both where we live, and how we grow our food (location and probably strains as well). Global warming is (almost) definitely not going to destroy all life on earth, but many of the forecasts are in extinction-level for most of the large animals. So life in general will continue, and probably humanity (since we are so good at making environment for ourselves), but the (eventual) changes are going to make the world very different, in ways that we are not going to like.
	▲	mithr an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's not meant as a perfect analogy for global warming, but rather an illustration of how a constant state isn't necessary for something to be said to be "changing", which was OP's claim.

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wat10000 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Only with an excessively literal interpretation.

If I pick up your house and drop it two streets over, that could be accurately described as a "location change" of your house. This is still true despite the fact that your house naturally moves some centimeters per year due to tectonic plates shifting around.

Similarly, when global average temperatures saw long term trends of a fraction of a degree of change per millennium, then suddenly started changing at multiple degrees per century, it's pretty reasonable to call that "climate change" despite the fact that it was not completely constant before.

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ChrisClark an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And you're just like the deniers who pick apart irrelevant things, and then smugly smile.