A video from a late-night TV show featuring six Southern California climate scientists speaking in plain language about the reality of climate change — some using bleeped out profanity to underscore their message — has gone viral.

The video that aired during Monday night’s episode of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” received nearly 500,000 views on YouTube, plus thousands of views on Huffington Post and other news and commentary websites reacting to the segment, thrusting the normally camera-shy researchers into the harsh glare of the climate change issue.

Alex Hall, a climate scientist from UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, called the video effective at calling out climate change deniers and those who say scientists want to perpetuate a hoax in order to attract more funding and make money.

“What I liked about it, was that in a funny way it showed how absurd it is to say that scientists would make this up,” said Hall on Wednesday. “It very effectively undermines this whole idea.”

In his introduction, Kimmel countered former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who spoke about the climate change hoax while promoting a movie made by Marc Marano, a denier of man-made climate change, called “Climate Hustle,” which aired Monday night in theaters, including some in Burbank, Arcadia and Glendora. Marano has no scientific background and instead was communications director for conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe, R-OK, ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee who has said climate change is a fallacy.

Saying he would rather listen to real scientists, Kimmel showed the video with Hall and Aradhna Tripati, paleoclimatologist and isotope geochemist also from UCLA; Nina Karnovsky, polar ecologist, and Chuck Taylor, environmental analytical chemist, from Pomona College; Jeremy Pal, civil engineering and environmental scientist and John Dorsey, marine environmental scientist, from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

The scientists shed lab coats and microscopes for a two-minute Hollywood close-up.

“When they called me, I didn’t know who Jimmy Kimmel was,” said Karnovsky, who teaches a class called “Global Change Biology” and whose research had taken her to both the Arctic and Antarctic.

“I was in Trader Joe’s and bumped into Pomona College chemistry professor Chuck Taylor. “He said ‘are you going to do this?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, what is this?’”

To avoid any potential embarrassment on set, Karnovsky made sure to look Kimmel up before she and Taylor took a Town Car hired by the show in to the taping.

The segment was recorded weeks ago, but no one, including the producers of the show, knew exactly when it would air.

After the segment finally aired, Karnovsky said she’s been hearing from “everybody in my life.”

“They’re all writing to me saying ‘I saw you in the Washington Post, I saw you in the Huffington Post,’ so that’s been really fun,” she said.

In the video, climate scientists use bleeped out profanity to speak directly to climate change skeptics, telling them that rising global temperatures are man-made, caused by carbon pollution: “When we tell you all this, we’re not “f***ing with you,” said Tripati in the video, a line repeated by some of the others.

Despite the flippant tone, Karnovsky said the issue is a serious one.

“The places I work, the arctic and the Antarctica, I have seen these changes,” she said. “I have seen starving polar bears. Glaciers I used to walk over, I now walk in front of, because now they have shrunk so much.”

Pal, one of the contributing authors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC) report released in 2007 that said global warming is “very likely” caused by man, said he first said no to Kimmel, thinking adding humor to such a serious issue was wrong.

After it aired, he was surprised by the overwhelming positive response left on his Facebook page and other social media. “I thought there would be more negative backlash from the denier community,” he said.

Hall, also an author of the IPCC report, said he was concerned about the appearance of scientists and a child actor dropping F-bombs.

“I was worried about sharing it on Facebook because I didn’t want my mother to see it. I still don’t swear around my parents,” Hall said with a chuckle. He noted that in the video, he was the only scientist not to use profanity, saying the Kimmel team thought he had an innocent face.

Karnovsky can’t explain why laypersons dismiss the conclusions of an estimated 97 percent of climate scientists who agree that man-made climate change is a real and a serious phenomenon.

“It’s mysterious to me, because there are intelligent people who are often the ones being naysayers, but I have to think they have some sort of agenda or they’re just really suspicious of scientists, and that makes me really sad,” she said.

Dorsey, 66, who teaches marine science at LMU and is an avid surfer, said he understands that perhaps older Americans feel threatened by this scientific research.

“They worked hard all their lives and they want to get their families better off and they hear you can’t do this or that because of climate change. It is not so much they don’t believe the science, it is their values are under attack,” he said.

Some of the confusion for the general public may be attributable to how climate works in general, with local weather being the result of ocean temperatures, air pressure and temperature, and many other tough-to-observe phenomena.

“It can be confusing, because global warming is causing warming, but in some places, it’s getting cooler,” Karnovsky said. “I sympathize with people, because it can be complicated.”

Perhaps predictably, commenters on the YouTube page for the video are attacking one another, calling each other idiots and worse. Kimmel on Tuesday read the negative comments on the air, saying most were penned by those with poor grammar.

“It’s exhausting” dealing with climate change deniers,” Karnovsky said. “I just try to put my science out there and let that stand.”