Sadly there has been so much misinformation and deliberate lies. The fact is that the effect of burning fossil fuels on our climate has been known for a long time, over 100 years. Climate science is incredibly complicated, most people do not have enough scientific education or attention span to be able to understand the complexity, and media always grabbed just tiny bit of the info given to them and ran with it, making up terms that they thougt peple might understand. When you only talk about one bit it seems to be contradictory. Climate scientists always talked about change, which will increase global temperatures, however the most noticeable change will be the increased frequency and severity of storms, heat waves and severity of winters especially in Europe and the USA. There is a stream of water that comes from the Caribbean, goes up around East Coast of the USA warming the continent, and then going down between UK and Continental Europe also stabilising the weather. However as this Gulf Stream is being affected by the climate change, it is expected that UK and Europe will suffer much colder winters. That is where the "ice age" headlines came from. And it is already happening. Europe is getting snowfalls in areas that did not used to have them, they are also having floods because all the snow melts in the same time, and the river that were regulated and dammed never had to cope with so much water in the past few hundred years. Then the summers are getting hotter and dryer resulting in catastrophic forest fires even in areas where this just did not happened in the past or at least not as severe.
People do not seem to be able to comprehend that the little bit we, humans, contribute matters. The best explanation I heard was a by an old climate scientist who said this:
"Imagine that you have a bath tub that is 99% full, there is a faucet that contributes 10litres of water every few minutes, and then there is a drain that drains off equivalent amount of water. The system is in equilibrium. Just as our climate has been for thousands of years. Now imagine that somebody turns the tap so it is adding 12 litres every few minutes, but does nothing to the drain; the water starts rising, and unless something is done it will not take very long before it overflows."
Unfortunately, once the CO2 "overflows" the damage to our environment is going to be irreversible, and will feed on itself. Forest fires will released more CO2, then storms will wash the top off, and will be hard to replant the areas, the rising sea temperature will kill many sea creatures, and fish. i can see the effects of bushfires here in Australia; I recall fires in Blue Mountains (1968?) next year we went up and you could hardly see bit of black trunk here and there. I lived through Ash Wednesday fires when we lived in Emerald (Dandenong Ranges). The fire stopped about km from our property. Few weeks later, after some good rain I drove through the area where many houses were lost and where people died, and it was all green again; sprouting from the blackness. Then there were the Black Saturday fires. Few years later (3 or more ?) we finally decided to go for a drive to Merrysville, where my daughter lived for a little while few years before the fires. It was still all black, with just little shoots of green; the whole hills looked still dead. I have not yet had the courage to go back to look.
Look at Queensland; its a tropical humid place, these sort of fires were unknown there before. California used to have 5 months fire season, now it is more like 8, and the recent fires happened in late autumn, that is like May or June in here, and burned with unprecedented fury; they stopped talking about the dead at about 200 (?) and I wonder how many will never be found.
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