The Gulf Stream collapsing would have monumental effects on Europe and the East Coast of the US. Hurricanes and Winter Storms would be even more wildly unpredictable. Here's the problem for me...
I've never truly believed in global warming.
Are we truly arrogant enough as humans to think we can alter the climate and patterns of the planet with gases, etc.? Of course, we are. There are 8 billion or so of us and hundreds of thousands of factories, etc., but that still takes up an insignificant amount of the planet as a whole.
I believe that large cities in the US and worldwide have warmed for one very particular reason: asphalt. Think of all the asphalt in our major cities. They call it an urban heat island, and it can make a city 2C or 5F or more warmer than a suburb with less asphalt and more greenery like trees and bushes.
Concerning Greenland glaciers melting and places like Alaska warming at alarming rates, I firmly believe climate change happens constantly - warmer and colder. We are in a small snapshot of time with our weather record keeping (140 years or so of reliable records), and tree rings can only tell us so much.
The earth's climate will continue to behave as it does regardless of the 1996 Paris agreement. But, we should always strive to clean up the air and emit less carbon to help. The only good thing that the pandemic did was shut down most factories and clean the air in a way it had not been since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
Again, these are my opinions just based on life experience.
There are people that believe the world is flat, there are people that struggle with heat equations.
> that still takes up an insignificant amount of the planet as a whole.
The space taken up by humans and their factories is irrevelant to AGW, what matters is the relative increase in insulating gases in the atmosphere. Not comparing CO2 in ppm to the entire atmosphere, Nitrogen and Oxygen don't insulate, but the amount by which humans have increased the insulation, trapping more heat energy (which cascades into other energy types).
If you're numerate you might like to start with something basic like Syukuro Manabe's 1967 Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...
> I believe that large cities in the US and worldwide have warmed for one very particular reason: asphalt.
By your own earlier claim "takes up an insignificant amount of the planet" let's just ignore that as that area is (according to you) insignificant and focus on the rise in average tempreture across the globe. That has increased.
Of course some climate denier claimed decades ago that the mean hadn't risen and it was all due to using measurements from urban heat islands (as you are apparently attempting to do). That was famouly looked into by a highly qualified physicist who was keen to prove them correct. The conclusion reached was urban heat islands had no effect on the global mean measurement and we weren't being fooled by asphalt. This is old news.
> I firmly believe climate change happens constantly
It does. On long time scales.
We are talking about rapid change on a "short" time scale (longer than a single human life, much much shorter than normal climatic scales of change).
> Again, these are my opinions just based on life experience.
What life experience is that?
Have you ever written a global scale geophysical "spreadsheet" type computational engine (like, for example, ERMapper, various ERDAS plugins, other geospatial differential modelling systems, etc).
Have you ever worked in the field gathering thousands or millions of line kilometers of data, ground truthed satellite readings, etc?