Have you ever found yourself in one of those conversations that stops you in your tracks? The kind where someone shares a perspective so different from yours that you’re left wondering how two people can look at the same world and see such completely different things?

I had precisely that moment earlier this month during one of my regular visits to the rehab hospital. A young therapist struck up a conversation and somehow we landed on the topic of our sweltering summer weather. What she told me next caught me completely off guard. It was a moment that made me pause and reflect on the power of belief and the complexity of our shared reality.

She looked me straight in the eye and said she didn’t believe the globe was warming up at all. According to her, summer temperatures today are no hotter than when she was a kid, and all this talk about climate change? Just the government feeding us lies.

Now, I’ll be honest with you—my first instinct was to launch into all the evidence I could think of. But then I caught myself. Here was someone being completely genuine with me, sharing what she truly believed. And isn’t everyone entitled to their own opinion? I respect her perspective, and I’ve learned that trying to change immovable minds is often just a waste of energy that leaves everyone frustrated.

But her explanation did make me think. She told me the earth was rotating on its axis like it always has, and what we’re experiencing now is just another natural epoch or era, like the ones we learned about in school. Her logic was that if she accepted climate change, she’d have to ignore everything she’d learned about dinosaurs and ice ages.

This sparked my curiosity.

I found this fascinating because, in a way, she was both right and wrong at the same time.

Here’s what she got absolutely right:

Earth has indeed gone through countless natural climate changes over millions of years. There have been ice ages, warm periods, and yes, mass extinctions like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Earth’s orbital cycles—scientists call them Milankovitch cycles—do affect our climate over tens of thousands of years. All of this is rock-solid science that every geology student learns.

But here’s where the wires got crossed.

The climate change happening now isn’t just Earth “rotating on its axis like always.” What we’re seeing today is primarily caused by human activities that are pumping greenhouse gases into our atmosphere at unprecedented rates. And the speed of this change? It’s happening in decades, not millennia.

The biggest disconnect in our conversation was that she was confusing natural climate variations that happen over geological time, which spans millions of years, with the human-caused climate change happening right now. Both absolutely exist— no question about it. But they operate on completely different timescales and have entirely different causes.

Think about it this way: we all know that forest fires occur naturally. Lightning strikes, dry conditions, and boom—you have a wildfire. That doesn’t mean we can’t also recognize when someone deliberately sets a fire with a match and gasoline. Both natural and human-caused fires are real phenomena, but they have different origins and often different behaviours.

The human factor

Here’s a telling detail that really puts things in perspective. During the ice age, there were no humans on Earth. In 1900, our world population was 1.65 billion people. Sixty years later, it had grown to 3 billion. Today, we’re pushing past 8 billion.

According to NASA, the diameter of Earth has never changed significantly, but the sheer number of humans living on it—and the industrial activity that sustains us—certainly has.

The scientific evidence shows us that while Earth’s climate has always varied naturally, the rapid warming we’ve seen since the mid-20th century is primarily due to human activities, notably our burning of fossil fuels. This conclusion comes from the exact same scientific methods we use to study those ancient ice ages and dinosaur extinctions that my hospital friend mentioned.

And here’s the beautiful thing: we don’t need to choose sides. We don’t have to choose between accepting the geological history we learned as kids and current climate science. Both are well-supported by mountains of evidence. They’re not competing theories—they’re complementary pieces of our planet’s complex story.

Finding common ground

What struck me most about our conversation wasn’t the disagreement itself, but how genuinely this woman believed what she was telling me. She wasn’t trying to be complex or contrarian. She was trying to make sense of information that seemed contradictory to her.

That could be the real lesson here. Instead of getting stuck in the ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ arena that seems to dominate so many conversations these days, what if we focused on understanding each other better? What if we spent more energy on solutions that benefit everyone, regardless of where we stand on the scientific details? I believe mutual understanding is the key to bridging our differences.

Because at the end of the day, whether you believe in human-caused climate change or not, we can all agree on wanting clean air for our children, healthy forests, and a world that sustains us for generations to come.

And maybe that’s common ground to build on.