That's a valid reason to respond as you did. It was my assumption that you were targeting that towards the parent which was in error.
> I was trying to engage with readers, by fighting this kind of nonsense simply by calling it out as such.
That works well for getting people who agree with you to take notice. Unfortunately, if you don't use that to make a new argument to those that already agree with you, you're just preaching to the choir. I don't really have a problem with that, and I wouldn't have called it out if I interpreted it as that, but I also don't think it's all that productive (that's not really meant to be a critique, I'm just explaining my personal point of view on this at this point).
> His claim itself is so vague and unsupported that it's more of an emotional feeling than an opinion that can be criticized. Perhaps someone better than me should try.
When I can summon the strength myself to engage, I find that asking for more details and asking people to actually explain in more detail their belief works well. Often I find that what initially seems like an opinion completely unfounded in facts has some basis, but people are reluctant to go into them because of dismissive responses.
I'm sure we all have a few opinions like that, where we would love to have a good discussion on it, but it's become decisive enough that trying to start a substantive conversation and keep it one track is hard when people make large assumptions about the details of your opinion without actually asking. For example, try starting a conversation on actual differences in how the brain functions between the sexes, and whether that does or does not lead to specific advantages or disadvantages for one sec in certain types of thinking, and whether that advantage if it exists is completely subsumed by environmental factors. I suspect that conversation will quickly approach uselessness if it gets any traction. Some discussions still have far too much cultural and social baggage to happen fruitfully in public, even here, where I'm sure a larger than normal percentage of people would identify as rational intellectuals.
To actually address your point, however. There is both a breadth and depth of scientific literature, which goes much beyond this nonsense of only "pretty charts". Even reading the linked article in the above nytimes article gives the detail the poster asked for.
Scientists work hard on this. They're not "making it up". They're not lazy. They're not just trying to get rich. Have you spent the last 10 years studying climate change? Have you read all the literature on the subject? From people who have claimed that it was human-driven or not, from scientists across the world and political spectrum. Scientists have. Their entire job is to stay up to date on the current research everywhere in their field.
When you have a problem you don't understand, or don't have enough information about, or don't have a good solution for, what do you do? You ask the expert. The scientists are the experts, and the scientists have a consistent, well-explained consensus on their positions (read the IPCC report for this exact thing). People's resistance to this consensus comes because of two reasons and two reasons alone. 1.) People don't understand climate change because it moves slowly, imperceptibly, and then violently. Climate is far away from an intuitive thing to study, and people's expectations for what's 'logical' in this case is in fact, not always 'logical'. 2.) People's preexisting political affiliations or preconceptions have colored their view. They believe that any position taken by Democrats must be a conspiracy, or ascribe to whataboutism and "moderation". "They're so adamant about this position! But both sides are wrong, so they must be wrong somehow!"
It's nonsense. The fact that so called "intelligent" programmers so easily fall for this garbage is sickening. People claim to be skeptical or logical, but it's all the same stuff with a different lens. Programmers are just as flawed, make their decisions on the same mindless emotional feelings, and don't question anything.
Reading the comments on this post made me lose faith that we will ever address any difficult political and societal challenges. We'll just argue for decades about whether they "actually exist".
I'm just sad the the first response wasn't something along the lines of: "Why? What does the graphic being a cartoon have to do with how accurate the data and the point it's trying to express is? Why are your experiences in a specific region supposed to map directly towards the overall global scenario? Why are you using hottest days in summer in your observation instead of total hot days, which is actually what's being discussed, since it's possible for the average to be much hotter, even if the largest outlier isn't as high for that year, right?"
It is not the responsibility of sensible people to persuade every last person in existence of the wisdom of a course of action; that's a recipe for paralysis.
What we have here is someone who expressed an aggressively ignorant counterfactual position and rebuffed polite encouragement to consult primary sources. Perhaps the person is trolling, perhaps they're just a fool, but either way people who make objections in bad faith do little other than waste time, and making endless excuses for them is a further waste of time.
This is why I said elsewhere on the thread that it's time to just move on without the buy-in of that part of the population that rejects the reality principle.