That's not my experience, at least for those denying while not in policy positions to do anything about it. They're actually fairly responsive to "let's really make sure we're not making our grand kids lives harder" kind of arguments if phrased in a way that doesn't set off preprogrammed responses.
They've just been so inundated with propaganda that they take the terms "act of god" so literally that they don't believe at a base level that humanity has the power to modify climate in ways that'll hurt us in the long term. Sort of that Teddy Roosevelt line of thinking; when he heard that buffalo were going extinct he organized a hunting party to not miss out before they were all gone. The idea is that any problems we cause, we'll be able to fix after the fact or won't really matter. The idea of being shepherds of the earth rather than simply inhabitants is a very new one, at least among western cultures.
Unfortunately the difficulty increasing that percentage isn't linear. It'll probably look like the vaccine rollout where there's a pretty hard dropoff in increases past a little over 50%.
Or that if we all just bought electric cars that the problem would be solved. Nobody seems to appreciate the scale at which this is operating.
The mass of the atmosphere is 5 x 10E15 tons. To heat that up by 1.5 degrees is off my scale of intuitive comprehension by a couple of orders of magnitude.
There is about 10t of atmosphere per square meter. It is the same mass as 10m of water. A lake with 10m of water is very shallow one and can heat up many degrees C even in a single sunny day.
And air is no water, it has much less heat capacity.
The global warming is not stalled at all by waiting to heat up the atmosphere.
The state of atmosphere is a result of balance of huge flows of energy. The atmosphere itself, as immense as it is, holds very little energy and if given chance would heat up to kill us all in couple of days.
The balance is influenced by a lot of factors like how much of energy is being absorbed by ground or reflected back to space.
By consistently adding a small amount of CO2 to atmosphere we keep a tiny part of energy from reflecting back to space. And by allowing the ice to melt the amount of energy reflected back gets even smaller (as ice reflects more than dirt). These very small differences in albedo are enough to cause all that mayhem.
The reason the global warming stalled for a long time is actually our oceans dissolving CO2. Now, the oceans' ability to dissolve more CO2 is reducing and removing CO2 no longer keeps up with us adding more of it.
> A lake with 10m of water is very shallow one and can heat up many degrees C even in a single sunny day.
Sunlight gives about 1 KW of incident energy per square meter (at the surface), about 70% of which gets reflected over water and about 30% of which gets absorbed. If we assume constant light during a whole 12 hour day and perfect perpendicularity of the photons hitting the surface that nets you 300 Watts continuously to heat up that 10 meter deep body of water. Any deviation from that 90 degree angle and it will be less (multiply by the sine of the angle).
The surface layer will warm up quite a bit but the deeper layers of your hypothetical lake will remain mostly unchanged until they are mixed by the wind or some other means with the surface layer.
Of course the atmosphere isn't anything like a lake, there is far less conduction of heat in the atmosphere than there is in a lake, and besides that the temperature is completely inverted from that lake, the higher temps are at the bottom, not at the top due to pressure and the presence of that handy nearby reflector and giant thermal mass: the earth.
The sun is doing most of the warming work, we have just tightened our greenhouse! There's the order of magnitude you needed.
Also the troposphere, other side of the co2 window-pane, is getting correspondingly colder..
