>> convince people that ... climate change is real Have you looked on how much easier it was to convince people that the hole on the ozone layer was real? >It

>> convince people that ... climate change is real Have you looked on how much easier it was to convince people that the hole on the ozone layer was real? >It was a much less observable phenomenon. It was too early on the life of the problem for many people to be affected, and it had much less visible symptoms. Yet, nearly nobody doubted it, and everybody agreed on taking action. I don't think those two problems can be compared like this. There are a lot of differences between them. For example: - Everyone was (or was going to be) universally affected negatively by the hole in the ozone layer while there are a lot of people that stand to benefit from the results of mild global warming (for a concrete example consider opening up of the north passage between Europe and Asia along Russia's coast). - The primary mechanism for ozone layer depletion was very easy to understand - refrigerant gas destroys ozone. Regarding global warming or climate change the way we can affect it(negatively or positively) is via human greenhouse gas emissions. There are additional mechanisms that affect it, there are non human greenhouse gas emissions, there are various feedback loops and trip points only some are known about. - Also, way to remedy. Regarding ozone layer, we just had to ban some chemicals we quickly found replacements for so there was no great sacrifice. Regarding greenhouse gases many people would agree in principle we should lower greenhouse gas emissions, but how do we actually do this? Some countries could build more nuclear power plants, solar and wind are expensive and unreliable unless backed by expensive large scale infrastructure. Then we also have the matter of already emitted gases by developed countries as part of their past development and the perceived hypocrisy of denying same technological advance to developing countries. This leads to ideas that are very difficult to reconcile. For example if there was some kind of global accounting for greenhouse gas emissions that took into account past emissions resulting in a system where developed countries would have to effectively purchase "carbon credits" from developing countries how do we account for underprivileged areas of so called developed countries. No matter how we attempt to resolve this people will consider it unfair and will vote in politicians that will revert it. Please note I didn't even mention the issue of non-compliance from countries such as China (or US). This is why I think there will be essentially nothing done about greenhouse gas emissions on global scale and we should plan for how to deal with the consequences of the change. There is also the risk of well-meaning climate-geoengineering attempts fucking it up really badly, but such attempts shouldn't be that difficult to prevent for state players.