[noknownsender]

If there is a potion of the population that is "sitting on the fence about climate change", it is highly unlikely that they "can be convinced by a clear and well founded explanation of what is happening"

Anybody capable of that, would either no longer be sitting on the fence, or are highly unlikely to be reading this article.

Also, the basic premise of your comment assumes that the effects on the monthly temperature can be cleanly broken down categorically into "fossil fuel related" and "El Nino related", which presupposes that a stronger and more frequent El Nino events are unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels.

The facts the human impact on climate change are overwhelming, both in their abundance and scope of impact. Pretending that they don't exist, or treating them as a tangential issue to be put aside so as to appeal to a skeptical and/or ignorant minority, serves no purpose other than to undercut the facts.

[nologic01]

There are people who are "in principle" accepting climate change but skeptical about the urgency and magnitude of adaptation that is required. This includes critical segments of the business and political worlds who weigh any action against their vested interests. These people will never panic. But they may plot a "changing of stripes" strategy if the signals from experts and society are strong and persistent.

This is discussion is really about how the experts (and, subsequently, mass and social media) popularize the explanations of weather events and what effect this might have on various segments of the population.

> which presupposes that a stronger and more frequent El Nino events are unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels.

I didn't pressupose anything, I qualified my statement. In fact people posted various interesting recent pieces of research in the thread and I learned that there are both additional potential factors that may be currenty overlapping and that understanding of a potential climate change / El Nino link is still elusive.

But that is beside the point. Even if there was a known link it doesn't change my remark that better framing is required. You would simply condition on the dependence, show the growing El Nino "diversity" against the underlying trend and indicate how this may have created an outlier realization.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

It's not beside the point, it IS the point.

There's too much currently unknown for any honest person to speak with the confidence the other poster is and that makes many people (myself included) distrustful.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

Or maybe they don't trust people like you, who can say things with so much confidence despite the scientific consensus not being _nearly_ as clear as you claim.