State of the climate: Heat across Earth’s surface and oceans mark early 2019

Here's a snarky reply, because I've laughed out loud upon reading your "they're on their way out" and the "we need stronger policies that cannot be swayed by public opinion" posted in one of responses.

>how you convince these people.

Four easy steps:

- show them the hockey stick graphs from models,

- show them the graphs from actual measurements,

- point out 2019 is colder than 2016, and probably than 2017, as per the article,

- point out the graph looks pretty close to a cluster of sine waves when watched at any scale

Congratulations, now they are convinced for life. You can celebrate that with them by watching the 2006 An Inconvenient Truth for all the beautiful animations.

Snark aside, the gist is: people who have been following news for some two decades or more don't generally get alarmed that easily.

Unfortunately the problem seems to be a Prisoner's dilemma for countries - curbing CO2 emissions without all other countries doing so puts said country at an economic disadvantage. It also puts a large onus on developing countries that don't have the established industry to easily convert to "greener" technologies/industries. Top that with most Western countries being in relatively low threatened areas comparatively and you get a large populace happy to remain ignorant.

I'm convinced the only possible savior at this point would be a Superpower aggressively enforcing environmental regulations to the point of going to war over it, but that seems unlikely.

Whether they believe it or not it's happening.

I think we need stronger policies that cannot be swayed by public opinion or we're screwed. There's no room for error at this point.

it's also a form of macho virtue signalling

Well, if they're old enough then they probably either experienced first-hand (or heard first-hand accounts from even older folks) the relative cold of the 1970s, which was preceded by the relative heat of the 1930s, which was of course itself preceded by a relatively cool period. So there is a definite down/up/down/up cyclical nature there.

And current flooding issues are generally nothing like what occurred before effective flood-control measures were put into place. And current forest fires are generally nothing like what occurred before effective fire-control methods were put into place. Being young, you've grown up in a fairly "controlled" world, so (much like anti-vax folks who don't understand what the world was like before vaccines came along), you have no life experience dealing with the world as it existed before those other controls were put into place.

Have you seen recent claims that scientists can detect temperature changes of as little as 1/1000th of a degree in the deep ocean, occurring over a period of several decades? Are you gullible enough to believe such claims? I'm not.