5: THANK you. I grew up as one of these "rural" people, and my entire family and I are staunch environmentalists. Yes, we had some batshit conservative neighbors, but funny thing; so do most people in the suburbs, and many people who live in the heart of large cities.

I'm not going to pretend that rural areas don't have higher doses of conservatives (shitty schools and low exposure to diversity lead to conservatism, in a nutshell), but they're not some twighlight zone where sane people never dwell.

Also, part of the problem with debating denialism is that people keep trying to cite current weather on land as evidence. The effects of climate change happen on land later, with less intensity, and in less predictable ways. The evidence of climate change is much stronger when you look at ocean phenomena. Sea temperatures have already risen more drastically than air temperatures. Sea levels have risen measurably and dramatically in recent years (several populated islands have been evacuated and submerged already; just look at the Maldives). Seawater is becoming more acidic due to increased CO2 input from the atmosphere, and we can see it killing coral by the acre. Coral didn't bleach into extinction during any of the many, many past "natural" temperature fluctuations of the earth that they've been through, as they're doing now; their dying serves as strong evidence that the current CO2 levels far surpass any natural CO2 fluctuations. Warm-water species are measurably sprawling into formerly cooler areas, and the habitat of cold-water species is measurably decreasing and shifting towards the poles.

But nobody mentions any of this evidence when climate change is brought in for debate in the political arena. It's always "melting ice caps" and "hockey stick graphs" and hurricanes and droughts, which are strong evidence, but there is enough vagueness to them that a sellout politician can make the case that these could be effects of natural warming cycles, taking advantage of most people's lack of understanding of climatology. They aren't as dramatic or cut-and-dry as what's going on in the ocean, and I wish more environmentalist policymakers would wise up and use larger portions of the arsenal of evidence that they have on their side, rather than the same old hockey-stick graph that, while valid, has been dishonestly misrepresented to the point where nobody is convinced by it anymore. Changes in land weather are real, yes, but they're (currently) subtle enough that your average denialist moron seems to be able to successfully counter it by pointing out that it still gets cold during winter. A coral holocaust, on the other hand, is much less subtle and much less easily countered by simplistic deception.