Hers is a over simplified explanation you cn tell climate deniers. This is my best understanding, I am not above beign corrected if anyone out there can explain it better... please do. I tried to make simple enough to be generally understood and over simplified (which means cut corners), but generally I think it is correct.

An increase in the average global temperature of just a few degrees changes the thermal dynamics of air currents globally, so that we experience a much wider temperature range into the extremes of both ends of the scale. However, the over all average will still be warmer over all.

Because the extremes go both ways, where we will experience record bold spells, scientists have backed off the "global warming" label and modified to as "climate change"

That is about as simple as the explanation can get.

Ok, so several years ago I'm sitting around the Thanksgiving table with the extended family, and my uncle and cousin start yakking amongst themselves about global warming--saying things like "What's the big deal?"; "Who cares if the temperature goes up by just 2 degrees?" and "Wouldn't that be great? I'd love it if it got a little warmer!" Cousin is a contractor and ski coach and uncle is a wealthy retired radiologist.

Meanwhile, I'm a college drop-out loser, cringing at all of this--because I took enough biology classes (my major) to know that a 2-degree rise in temperature is exactly the kind of environmental stress that, under the right circumstances, could absolutely devastate an organism--perhaps wipe it out entirely--which could lead to cascading detrimental effects that damage or destroy whole ecosystems.

Very, very, very bad--on a local scale. On a global scale, it's terrifying. That kind of change could reshape life on Earth as we know it--indeed, has been already: e.g. algal blooms, coral die-offs.

I could have said something--I wanted to say something--but it's been my experience that wealthy, conservative, society types who have scads of connection and prestige don't like to be contradicted by poor, liberal, bookish, waifish pariahs, who just happen to be informed on a particular subject. I bit my tongue quite hard that day...

Facts are of no interest to him. ??