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by strken 727 days ago
I think there's a good argument that either or both factors contributed. We tend to blame people because they have agency and the natural world does not, and that's not a bad way to understand things.

My main point was that I don't think it would be denialism for someone to say "no, the species was pushed to the brink by climate change anyway, we know other species went extinct prior to human colonisation, and even though humans arguably made it worse there's no conclusive evidence". Glacial maxima are hundreds of thousands of years apart and given the timescales involved it's hard to say whether a species is adapted to them or whether it just got lucky.

1 comments

Weren't there something like 5 glacial maxima in the past 200 thousand years? I had the impression they were more regularly occurring than "hundreds of thouands of years apart".
Yeah my bad, I meant that glacial and interglacial periods happen in a cycle that can take up to 100k years before it repeats, but phrased it in a way that's outright wrong as well as misleading. I think the overall point still stands though.