allan
This is a good take on "but the climate has changed before"
"I have never understood how anyone could find this comforting. The natural climate changes that have shaped human history have almost always been smaller and more regionally contained than the large-scale human-caused change we are currently experiencing. And even these changes have provoked suffering, scapegoating, and the collapse of civilizations."
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/lost-cities-and-climate-change/
allan
Relatedly, in The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells he talks about "the planet is warming, but it's not due to humans" talking point and how that is terrifyingly worse.
i.e. how is "the planet is warming and we can do nothing about it" better than "the planet is warming, due to human factors, which we control"?
M. Grégoire
@allan I wonder if there are counter-examples, societies that flourished because of climate change. None come to mind.
Sudden change is bad in any case.
allan
@mpjgregoire maybe the pueblo people of the American Southwest? iirc there was a window of a few centuries wherein the Southwest was much wetter and supported much more agriculture than it does now.
While we remember the end of that period and the return to desert times as (local) climate change destroying a civilization, it was climate change that made it possible in the first place...
allan
@mpjgregoire I think a similar thing was true in parts of what is now the Sahara and the Sahel. During wetter times in the past people moved into what had been deserts and made a life for themselves. I think that it ended doesn't negate everything that was created or render meaningless the lives of the people who lived there.
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