For what it's worth, as a kid in late 1980s California public schools, I do remember learning about the basics of the Greenhouse effect and why it would likely

For what it's worth, as a kid in late 1980s California public schools, I do remember learning about the basics of the Greenhouse effect and why it would likely become a problem in our lifetimes, sometime between 4th and 6th grades, I think. This was in the era of Deukmejian and Wilson as governors, when California was still run by Republicans. I have no idea if that still gets taught, or how much of an effect it had on the late Gen X/early Millennial generations to be taught this (assuming it wasn't just California), but I feel like it did have an impact at least on me. As you say, the physics is extremely simple and straightforward to the point you can explain it to a 10 year-old and they'll understand it. Carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. Beyond that, you can look at a very simple plot of average global temperature and see it rising almost in lockstep with anthropogenic release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The fact that there are often local abnormally cold winter events in specific places doesn't change that the global averages are still rising. I'm not really sure what to say beyond that. I could see some plausible case being made through the 70s and 80s that we were just coming out of the post-medieval Little Ice Age, but the trend has only accelerated since then and we are way past the hottest it has been since the Holocene and thus the dawn of agriculture. I still see a few David Friedman types out there trying to argue we can't know for certain if it won't be a net positive as places like Siberia become arable land in the coming centuries (he'll definitely never know since he's almost 80), but to deny that warming is happening beyond what might be expected from purely cyclical natural phenomena at this point is willful ignorance. Even the actual oil companies don't try to make this argument any more. It's pure culture war, reflexive rejection of any piece of information, no matter whether it is fact or opinion, based on its having been associated at some point with some conception of an academic "left."