| Let me preface this by stipulating that I believe the evidence that humans have contributed to a warming climate in the last few centuries with all of our carbon emissions, primarily from energy production. I'll further add that it's entirely possible and even quite likely that we are in and have either caused or massively contributed to a mass extinction event. That being said, I really wonder at the thinking of what I would call "climate alarmists". I mean the Pacifica cliffs are a story about erosion. Ok, sure. But some like to push this narrative that unless we drastically do something the Earth will turn into Venus, basically. Thing is, these "boy who cried wolf" type narratives don't really help change perceptions or habits around climate change. What's more, they don't really pass the smell test. The Earth has been around for billions of years. It's also been much hotter than it is now (eg [1]). The smell test is basically this: a lot can happen in 5B years and if the Earth has been much hotter than it is now and it hasn't turned into Venus yet, why is now different? There's actually a pretty natural limit to how much carbon we can add to the atmosphere. Eventually we'll just run out of fossil fuels, at which point, we'll just start making them out of thin air and that, by definition, will be carbon neutral. Honestly I just don't believe we'll fundamentally change human nature here. While that might be fatalistic, even pessimistic, personally I'm optimistic. And I'm optimistic because with not much more automation than we already have the Earth can grow enough food for 10 times as many people as we have now and possibly much more than that and that everything changes once we get sufficiently cheap energy (and obviously I'm optimistic about that happening in the not too distant future). Some here will write that off as naive futurism. Whatever. With regards to sea level rise, let me add some more context. Over the span of ~5000 years 9000 to 14000 thousand years ago the sea levels rose SIXTY METERS [2]. And we're still here. That's also a blip on the timeline of Earth's geological history. Whose to say the sea levels won't recede with the next Ice Age? Or are we now arguing the Earth is done with those too? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Holocene_sea_level_rise |
It's also worth acknowledging that Earth has had very different climates in the past. Sure, we can celebrate the fact that our sparse nomadic ancestors survived and adapted through gradual environmental change. That tells us almost nothing about the ability of our globe spanning, voraciously energy hungry, WMD-wielding civiliation's ability to do the same of much, much shorter time frames.
I don't quite understand the "well Earth will be fine" form of denialism. Sure, Earth would survive a total nuclear war over geological timeframes too. That doesn't really mean anything to humans as an advanced society that plans to stick around for more than a few hundred years.