Ask any of your friends how much sea level will rise by 2050 and you will get some pretty wild answers.

It's a technical subject that does not immediately affect most of us on a day to day basis. It is not surprising that people would have poorly informed opinions on a topic they don’t really care about very much.

For what it’s worth, the average college educated liberal has a comparably abysmal understanding of climate change but their ideological judgement happens to be closer to reality on this one.

I’m an ex-climate militant, so the fun part is that I have a very large corpus of knowledge on this topic. It’s an incredible experience to have read papers deeper than people who try to defend climate, and to know the weakness of each paper. Militants and even professionals really generally don’t know what they’re talking about, which is across the board in climate change. They are right, but often by mistake or pure luck, and I abhor that.

The sad part is any scientific topic that becomes politicized, becomes abyssal in terms of science. It is true of climate change, feminism before that, all the way back to 1500 and planets.

I guess it got swept up in the reasonable skepticism that resulted from the exposed overt politisation of science that was already on the rise but went hokystick in 2020?

OTOH climate science as a field did already suffer from siege mentality before, whether justified or not, that did suppress rather than engage disallinged views.

(Fwiw my own not too informed view on the subject is we are heading for real disaster, we will and have postponed any real action until too late, but it will be the geo-engeneering grifters that will put the final nail in the coffin)