[starmanres]

Originally posted by Sk8r
There's a difference between an argument citing people and one citing data. I'll go with the second sort, myself.

I live right atop the result of the last big climate change, and am well aware of the time frame. 13,000 years since the last big thaw ripped the surface off western WA. 13000 years since nature began building the big reefs we have now. 13000 years since mammoths and wooly rhinos could have had a foothold here, and that was a global warming. It still left us with some glaciers, which hiccuped a bit wider during the Little Ice Age, which ended/fizzled off about 200 years ago, having onset around the time of the Viking raids on England. But it has now more than fizzled off. The warming has exceeded previous benchmarks set during the last 13000 years, and is going to change sea level---is already in process of changing the sea level and salinity.

The things most people accept as 'the world'--- the reefs, and the current map of the world---are in fact 13000 years old.

So yep, climate change isn't some long-ago thing, relative to those things. Now, mind, earliest known urban civilization dates to about 9,000 BC, so we weren't standing there in 3 piece suits watching the Columbia Gorge rip out toward the sea, but we're standing here in that condition watching the last glaciers on the planet melt, watching pieces of Antarctica float by, watching the North Pole melt---and having just lately gotten enough science done to realize that (the reason Britain and New York and the Pacific NW are warmer than their latitude suggests) the warm ocean currents MOVE because of the thermohaline phenomenon---salt drives them. Change the relative salinity at a couple of vulnerable places, and people in the north should buy parkas and people in the south are going to bake.
"Global warming" maybe, but it leads to "global climate change." Sure it's a 'natural cycle'---like a big rock, it'll slide downhill. It goes faster and straighter if you grease the skids...and what I'm talking about isn't PREVENTING it---you can't. But while we stand debating about it, we're not doing as much as we should do to prepare our civilization to hold out if we lose our major agricultural belts to an ice field and simultaneously lose the southern rain patterns and have an overheat in those regions. Planets pretty well stay as hot or as cold as they are due to solar output and planetary albedo---but they move the cold and heat around---we call it 'weather' and 'winds'. ---one area gets way cold, then another gets correspondingly hot. The average may stay the same, but the extremification of the regions means collapse of plant and animal populations that rely on the status quo.
Can we buy it off? No. Prepare for the event---and the possibility of a rapid onset, as may be indicated in some models? I think that's a prudent notion.

Excellent response and well thought out. I commend you on your insight and expression.