YOU'RE NOT AN EXPERT ON CLIMATE CHANGE

"Climate change is a fact"

What does that sentence really mean?

Does it mean "The climate is changing" or "The climate is not was it used to be and won't be what it is now in the future"? In that case, I think it's fair to say that's true...but it's not very meaningful or insightful.

Does it mean "The Earth is warming up at exactly the rate predicted and in the exact way predicted by our climate models"? In that case, it would be extraordinarily insightful...but not very true.

Or does it mean something between those two things?

If the weather forecast says "12 inches of snow" and you get 3 inches, was the prediction right? Was the snowfall a "fact"? What about if you do get 12 inches, but a day or 2 after it was supposed to fall? What if you get 12 inches of snow at the right time...but a few hundred miles off? I would say there is no clear-cut, one-word answer to that question. Nobody's saying that there was no snow, nobody is pretending that it was 100% sunny that day.  But you could argue that the prediction was not 100% on, that being off by a factor of 4 is an error big enough to call it a failure or a useless prediction. You could rate the "truth" of the prediction as a 7 out of 10 or something. Even better would be to rate each aspect of the prediction separately, like A+ for quantity, B- for timing and so on. In none of those cases is it crystal-clear whether the forecast became a "fact" or not. It's all on a scale.

You're not an expert on climatology or climate change. I'm sure as hell not one. Nobody you know personally is. Even the world's leading authorities on the subject are having trouble coming up with a model that is not so inaccurate that it becomes completely useless. Climate models are mindblowingly complex pieces of mathematics, physics, dynamics, and so on. Thousands of scientists all over the world have to cooperate and rely on each others' research and results to come up with predictions and. On top of that, it's next to impossible to get your hands on data that has not already been spun in one political manner or another. The best we have right now basically boils down to "It's definitely going in this general direction but with pretty large error bars on both sides"

Add the twist that there is much to gain by overselling the "threat" of climate change to rival industrial nations. If one superpower can keep running its economy full-throttle while others voluntarily sign crippling accords and deals, it gains a yuge advantage. Climate change propaganda is partly a weapon of economic and monetary domination.

Factoring all that, you're left with little in lieu of easy-to-digest, simplistic conclusions. Endlessly repeating "Climate change is a fact because 98% of climate experts agree on it" or sharing clips of Bernie Sanders saying it does not make you look smart...or I should say, it makes you look exactly as smart as the ones yelling "Climate change is a hoax".