The future of climate change may not be what you think.

What do we really know about climate change?

Hundred-year floods in Central Texas. Wildfires encroaching on the Grand Canyon. Powerful hurricanes, heat records, even winter storms — these events have many people sounding the alarm about climate change. 

But which is it? Wetter or drier? Hotter, or more extreme in general? Can one effect possibly be causing such a wide range of problems? Are humans contributing to severe weather, or are these mostly random and uncontrollable events that the media is putting under a microscope?

Earlier this year, I had a simple idea for a piece: I wanted to write about how the scientific understanding of climate change has evolved, since most people seem to be operating on dated talking points or repeating ones that they don’t fully understand. Climate change was one of the topics readers most recommended for us to write more about in last year’s reader survey, and I think what I learned from talking to some of the leading experts on climate change will be valuable to anyone interested in this topic (whether you are skeptical of the theory or wish more people accepted it). 

But I simply can’t begin to talk about climate change without first addressing the deep divisions that it inspires. 

A 2023 Yale and George Mason survey found that 72% of Americans believe global warming is occurring, but only 58% believe it is caused by humans. A 2024 Pew survey found that 73% of U.S. adults report feeling sad about what is happening to the Earth, but 51% are suspicious of those pushing for climate action. And according to a 2025 Gallup poll, 63% of Americans believe the effects of climate change are already here, while another 23% believe that they will occur in the future; however, 51% believe that climate change will not pose a serious threat to their way of life, and 41% believe its seriousness is exaggerated.

Long story short: A majority of Americans believe the global climate is changing, many think those changes are overstated, some don’t think humans are causing them, and others don’t believe it’s happening at all. Most people see the smoke, but many are deeply skeptical about the fire.

As frustrating as it is — and it is indeed frustrating to most people — any issue that becomes salient enough in the United States becomes political, then partisan, then extremifying. A French mathematician in the 1820s discovers that our atmosphere retains heat radiation, and 200 years later a U.S. Senator throws snowballs on the Senate floor and activists are tearing up art in museums.

We’ve formed a partisan divide on climate change that mirrors our political spectrum. It’s not enough to understand the theory of climate change, you have to believe in it — and if you accept the fundamental theory, you’re pressured to accept climate existentialism. It’s not enough to be skeptical of climate change projections, you have to deny them — and if you’re skeptical of some prognostications, you’re pressured to reject the entire scientific framework. 

Perils exist on both ends, but I want to stress this before going any further: Climate change is not one of those issues dominated by loud extremes where the truth is somewhere in the middle. The Earth is warming, global climates are changing, and the causal factor is human activity. Human-caused climate change is about as proven as the theory of tectonic plates, and no differences of philosophy or political leaning can change that.

Where the truth is much more nuanced is in the debate over how emissions-caused warming will change the climate in the future. On that point, a lot of the points both the alarmists and the skeptics make are true — but a lot of them aren’t. And a lot of the public’s beliefs about the effects of climate change diverge from the leading experts’ projections in very significant ways.

What we know.

At its heart, human-caused climate change is based on a simple theory: Certain gases in our atmosphere trap heat, humans have introduced more of those gases into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial age, and as a result the planet is getting warmer. Thus “global warming.” However, this global warming isn’t felt uniformly, and its effects are broader than just higher temperatures — thus “climate change.” 

(Note: If you want a deeper understanding of climate change, you can read our 2021 climate change explainer here.)

Interestingly, the basic theory of climate change hasn’t evolved much in the past 130 years; it’s always been about subtracting the energy leaving the planet from the energy coming in. 

“In an unchanging climate, that difference is zero because we're in long-term balance,” Tom Delworth, a senior scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), explained to me. “If you're not in long-term balance, and you're taking in more energy than you're giving off, you're going to warm up,” Delworth said. “The planet is warming, and you just can't escape that. That's the same as 2 plus 2 equals 4.”

Energy in, energy out. Simple.

Many people don’t know that this warming was actually predicted before it was measured. Kyle Armour, a joint professor in the School of Oceanography and Department of Atmospheric & Climate Sciences at the University of Washington, said this even surprised him at first. 

“Lay people, myself included before I got into the field, often think that we observed a bunch of warming and now we're inventing reasons for it,” he said. “But that couldn't be further from the truth.”

In the 1820s, French mathematician Joseph Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect, in which some naturally occurring gases in our atmosphere — like carbon dioxide and methane and water vapor — allow light to pass through them and then re-radiate heat from the Earth back to the planet’s surface. Several decades later, in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first theorized that human emissions would generate enough additional atmospheric carbon dioxide to cause global warming. In 1958, Charles Keeling started measuring atmospheric CO2 for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii; the laboratory’s measurements have increased every year since.

It wouldn’t be for another few decades that the accumulated carbon dioxide would generate detectable warming. “We've really observed the warming since the 1980s,” Armour told me. “That's really what has taken off.”

Since then, scientists across the world have developed increasingly sophisticated models of our global climate to both test the theory and make predictions. As David Lawrence, senior scientist in the Terrestrial Science Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory, told me, these models have proven the theory conclusively. 

“We've established without essentially any doubt anymore that humans are responsible for the vast majority of climate change that we've seen,” Lawrence said.

How we know it.

Since the 2000s, scientists from different disciplines have worked together to develop integrated models of different Earth systems to accurately simulate how the global climate and carbon cycle operate together. That is, experts in land systems have worked with experts in atmospheric sciences and oceanography to model how energy and greenhouse gases are exchanged between the land, atmosphere, and oceans. 

These models — called “coupled models” or “Earth system models” — form the foundation of modern climate science. Two of the researchers I spoke to for this article are responsible for developing these models.

Their findings show how out of step most people’s perceptions of climate change are with the cutting-edge scientific understanding.