"Global Warming" (This is Not About Partisan Politics)

I have cousins whose politics are diametrically different from mine.  There are a few recurring topics of debate, and one of them is "global warming."  My cousins are "climate change deniers."

There are three arguments made by people who do not want climate change addressed.  One is that climate change is not caused by people.  The second, and related, is that people cannot reverse or even impede climate change.  But the real stalwarts of the anti-climate change argument assert that there is no climate change.  There is no global warming.  It's all made up, and the assertion that there is climate change is invented by people who either want to profit from this assertion, or they just want to make a name for themselves.  Actually, one of my cousins even sent an article that argued that there is global cooling.

This is how this debate regularly goes.  The closest either of my cousins has come to acknowledging what appears to most of us to be painfully obvious is to cite observations of an average global temperature increase of about 1.5 degrees F in the past century.  Apart from that one tentative accession, the debate never moves.  Until today.  One of these guys sent me the following link:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/11/miami-drowning-climate-change-deniers-sea-levels-rising

I don't know why he sent it.  I don't know if he thinks the article is tongue-in-cheek.  It's very unlike him-- unheard-of, actually-- to concede any point about anything.  But he did send this link.  Maybe he was making tangential fun of me, almost like a non sequitur, for living in Miami.  He lives in Connecticut.  I replied, telling him it was an interesting article.  Which it is.  And that's all I wrote.

The fact is I like my cousins.  I'm very fond of them.  As much as our political debates unnerve all of us, it's personally reassuring and pleasing to have a little conciliation like this.  Mostly, I am branded as a lefty, a socialist, sometimes a Communist, I'm accused of failing to listen to reason, and I am declared disqualified.  It's nice to find out they themselves, or at least one of them, can keep an open mind.