For me – scientifically-minded layperson, but not a climate scientist – the issue seems to be that people have conflated & confused two issues. One: that the cl

For me – scientifically-minded layperson, but not a climate scientist – the issue seems to be that people have conflated & confused two issues. One: that the climate was, without argument, different in the past. Two: that we are now, without argument, influencing the climate due to the extraordinary amount of carbon dioxide that we are producing. One does not preclude the other. Was the climate different, often hotter and drier, in the past? Sure. Evidence shows that it was. But does that mean that we aren’t leading ourselves in to a short/medium-term catastrophe by dumping enormous amounts of CO2 in to the environment now? No. The two are unrelated. Imagine if we determined that the climate was on a natural cycle, such that the entire Earth would warm, fires and droughts would become commonplace, and that sea levels would rise as a result of global temperature. Would we just do nothing? I’d hope not. I’d hope that it would spur us in to action, to realise that our quality of life is about to radically change, that human migration will necessarily increase, that people living near the sea, or depending on water, will have their lives irrevocably changed. That has happened in the past. We just didn’t have such a complicated society at the time, so the impacts were less. If you count the extinction of the Egyptian society as “less”. It’s also happening now, except we are doing it. Voluntarily, with full knowledge of the ultimate result. That seems, to people like me, a bit silly.