As a teenager I straight up called my dad a fucking idiot to his face for saying “Some scientists somewhere are getting rich off global warming hoaxes” and was rather unprepared to explain his (lack of) thought process when I asked “how?”

To paraphrase, “Someone somewhere is making money off of it or the news wouldn’t be talking about it”, the news being Fox and all they were doing is saying how fake it is, not that it’s real.

“If you really believe that, then you’re a fucking idiot.”

Surprisingly, my mother never heard of this conversation and he never brought it up after that.

And around 2010 I stopped hearing him say anything negative about climate change.

Now he’s starting to realize how little snow his childhood town gets compared to back when him and his brothers could go driving onto a lake in the 70s. Idk if he actually believes it’s real yet, but he hasn’t denied it when others talk about it in many years.