And smoking a cigarette won't kill you. Smoking one cigarette a day won't kill you. And most people who smoke don't actually get lung cancer.

But it all catches up with you. Smoking a cigarette a day for a decade is going to cause you to die earlier than if you hadn't. Smoking more, even earlier. Most is not all. Because most people who have lung cancer are smokers. And lung cancer isn't even the only thing. There's emphysema, heart disease, etc that's all related to smoking. And way more likely. But that's all aggregate.

Climate is a lot like that. It's nothing in isolation, it's everything in aggregate.

So to be fair to humans, skepticism is often rational, in the sense that science of complex systems can be off.

The part I have not totally understood is that there are good reasons to be more energy efficient and ecologically sensitive even in the absence of climate change per se.

If anything scientists have been abundantly cautious with their messaging. Many predictions made in early IPCCC reports were in many cases too lenient. Feedback systems, impacts, and rate of warming have been happening on track or faster than reported. I suspect many knew but they didn’t want to be labelled as alarmists.

And then new's outlets take that cautious wording and turn it into extremely alarming headlines. It's exhausting.

I wonder if we’re evolving to get better at that, if ever so slightly

I've ruined a couple of people's perspectives by sharing the the reason LA sunsets are so beautiful is because of the pollution particulate.

What if every weather app showed, next to actual temperature, what the temperature is modelled to be if climate change had been avoided (kept CO2 ppm to 1950s levels, say)?