Of the remaining climate "skeptics"—the ones doing actual research and publishing actual results—their work has either not held up to peer review or is inconclusive. None of them, not one, has produced evidence that climate change is not happening or that climate change is not human-fueled that has then been accepted as provable fact. If one ever does, they will win the Freaking Nobel Prize and be remembered forever because despite the opinions of conspiracy theorists, scientists really, really would rather believe that we are not systemically altering the very atmosphere of the planet on which we live. It is bad news—an extinction-level event that we are watching happen in our own lifetimes, and which will leave behind completely different ecosystems.

It would have been nice if lead paint didn't cause chronic health problems. It would have been nice if acidic precipitation from midwestern power plants wasn't etching the paint off New England cars. It would have been nice if sugary and fatty foods weren't causing obesity, diabetes and other modern American health problems.

But on a regular basis science found out that something we thought was harmless or good or fun indeed has a very big downside, and then everyone tests that theory to make darn sure it's right, and then we have to act based on the new information even if it makes us irritated or sad or otherwise inconveniences us because lead paint is still really, really bad for you whether you believe it or not.

Once upon a time people who were Not Scientists did believe the Earth was flat and that it was the center of the universe. This was largely faith-based reasoning; an assumption based on looking around and presuming the entire universe was whatever you could see with your own eyeballs. Then people with access to more information re-tested the theories and found that based on what mankind had learned, they couldn't possibly be true. They proved their points with observations and math; other people checked the observations, and checked the math; those people were scientists. They didn't "believe" their point; they proved it.

So what happened then? The usual chaos that happens whenever mankind learns something new. People who believed the old thing because by gum that's what their grandpappies believed and it's good enough for them got very mad, and subjected the scientists in the crowd to the before-times equivalent of Donald Trump hate tweets, and the people who really, really wanted to believe the Earth was flat took it upon themselves to adopt scientific methods themselves to prove the new thing wasn't true after all, and ...

... they came up short. They couldn't do it. The people who did believe the world was flat couldn't come up with contrary proof of their view that still fit all the new evidence; you simply couldn't make the geometry work. Those people either changed their opinions or discarded the science to scream from the sidelines again; either way, the "scientific community" would eventually adopt the new models over the old, proven false ones and went on to use the new models to prove even more radical discoveries. Repeat.

So where are we at right now?

Climate deniers right now have no observations or evidence that conclusively proves their point of view, and in fact are extremely short of evidence that even suggests it. A think-tank wag or your uncle's conservative friend might post charts showing momentary modern cooling; scientists versed in climate studies quickly point out those charts are dishonest because they have selected an artificially favorable short-term baseline—and if you don't know what all of those words mean, you don't belong in the climate conversation. Newcomers to climate science may make dramatic declarations about volcanoes or sunspots; climate scientists with more experience respond with calculations demonstrating how those factors are already taken into account in their models, because of course the scientific community was already testing those factors as well.

Climate deniers are attempting to re-prove the Earth is flat, but they can't make it work with the new evidence. We know how much water expands when it gets warmer. We know the melting temperature of ice, and the densities of water at various salinities. We know carbon's effects in the atmosphere. We know temperatures are currently, regardless of cause, rising. We know the effects of dissolved carbon in water, and albedo effects, and glacier extents, and how many volcanoes and sunspots there have been during different periods, and it doesn't matter a damn whether Anthony Scaramucci knows any of these things—they remain true either way.

The remaining questions are interesting too. How will new storm patterns arise? What feedback effects might we be missing? Can we better pin down the timelines for all this? But they're all attempting to predict the outcome of atmospheric change, they're all tinkering around the edges of what we already know, and all of it is firmly based on the measurable climate change happening right now, today.

Almost everyone reading this probably knows all that explanation, of course. But it's still worth revisiting because we eventually have to figure out how to explain it to the Anthony Scaramuccis of the world in a way that they, too, will finally understand.

Given that the size of Scaramucci's pocketbook depends on not understanding it, though, it may be an impossible climb.