The reality is that climate change is resulting in 100 year events becoming 10 year events. Yes, the barrier probably would have been washed away _eventually_ irrespective of our changing climate, but sea levels are rising (104mm since 1993) and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is increasing. Everything that is now happening occurs in the context of our destabilizing climate. Given this, I'm not sure how supportable it is to declare that climate change is not, at the very least, a contributory factor in events like these.
Or you know, maybe people are too stupid to estimate probabilities like that. Our history is too short to really know what is normal and what is out of line. In geological terms, we are still very much coming out of an ice age and far from peak temperatures that we know have happened before.
> In geological terms, we are still very much coming out of an ice age
In geological terms, AGW aside, the earth was still very much within the Late Cenozoic Ice Age and has been for 34 million years.
In glaciation terms the earth was swinging out of an inter glaciation period and due to return to glaciation and decreasing global tempretures and increasing ice coverage.
Thanks to human activity increasing the insulation attributes of the atmosphere mean tempretures are increasing and global mean tempretures will increase past what we (as a human species) have experienced in our brief time on the planet.
> far from peak temperatures that we know have happened before.
It's true - we're a long way from living on the surface of a near molten ball of rock with no breathable atmosphere, as the earth once was.
Ok you got me. I meant in the last few hundred million years it has been way hotter than today. Life existed and thrived back then as well. We are coming out of an ice age and temperatures must necessarily increase as a result, regardless of any presumed impact humans have on that process. This may be interfering with estimations of the impact of CO2 on our atmosphere. I'm not claiming to be an expert on this but I am skeptical of people who claim to be experts on this, as alarmism inherently boosts their careers.
Hate to break it to you, but humans are not stromatolites.
Humans have been about for two million years and have evolved to live in recent climatic conditions and to thrive in the extremely relatively stable Holocene.
> We are coming out of an ice age
On what evidence?
By the record we are in an ice age (do see and read my prior link) and not only were we expected to stay in that ice age but were expected to return to increased glaciation (ie decreasing tempretures).
The only reason we are coming out of an ice age is due to human activity increasing the bulk insulation properties of the atmosphere.
> I'm not claiming to be an expert on this
I've spent four decades in geophysical exploration developing instruments and software for mapping earths energy and mineral resources for extraction.
I'm also not claiming to be an expert but I have some exposure to continent and global scale modelling of gravity, radiometrics, magnetic fields, tidal movements, drift, etc.
This page has some good general information that you ought to be aware of before talking to people about this topic: https://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/module-3/temperature-trend-chan... In short, the planet's temperature shifts wildly in geological time, even in a human time scale. Our written language and species may eventually survive long enough to convey all of this information past the next ice age, whenever that is to happen.
>The only reason we are coming out of an ice age is due to human activity increasing the bulk insulation properties of the atmosphere.
The climate is naturally cyclical, as explained in my reference above and many other academic sources. Again I'm not suggesting there is no human impact but that this may be difficult to isolate, no matter how confident various researchers claim to be in their models. We humans have lived through an ice age only 20k years ago and that ice age has been ending ever since, and not because of us. As an armchair geologist you should know about that as well as the Little Ice Age much more recent than that. This looks interesting: https://www.history.com/news/ice-age-human-survival
