Rate of Climate Change

There is no known natural cycle in which the rate of change in global temperature matches what's been happening in the past few decades. Current and even projected temperatures are well within the range of what happens naturally, but it's happening much faster than it ever has before. This has worrying implications for the ability of ecosystems to adapt, and more importantly for us humans, for the ability of civilization to adapt. Civilizations have collapsed due to slower, smaller cha

Addressing one of your points:The earth absolutely goes through periods of warming and cooling, and has for billions of years. The issue we're encountering now is the speed of the change. Existing ecosystems can't adapt and move, like they typically do. Human societies also struggle to adapt. We unfortunately deeply depend on stability of climate - our national borders and economies and agricultural systems have a high inertia to change.I suspect that you don't believe that

natural changes like ice ages take thousands of years. What we see now is a rapid in front of your eyes change.

It's not change that is alarming, it's the rate of change. In the past, you'd have something like 1 degree C of change over the course of tens of thousands of years. Now you have that same change in less than a few hundred years. Short of a massive asteroid hit, the Earth hasn't experienced that sort of short term change.

"not much will change for some time"If you look at it from much longer term perspective, it's scary because it's happening extremely fast (1 generation) within nations that have reached a certain level of material prosperity and stability.It's also 'scary' because it's never happened before.'100 years' when we will really see the effects more globally, is not a 'long time', it's a 'quite a short time'.W

But now we're changing climates over the course of hundreds of years, not tens of thousands. We're not giving nature time to adapt (nor ourselves, for that matter)Climate change is "normal" on our planet, yes. But it's not normal at the speed at which we are causing it now.

Not at the timescale humans are forcing.

You seem very certain that earth can never have rapid (decades length, centuries?) changes on earth before, or that it could ever happen, without human activities?

We were heading into an ice age, which would be just as bad for humans. The issue is that we built a bunch of things that depend on the current climate, but the climate has been changing for a long time and will keep changing. We need to adapt to it or find a way to adapt it.The holocene is an incredibly small period compared to the age of the Earth. Nature doesn't gaf, it'll cycle in and out and we'll have to adapt.

I'm not educated enough to speculate, but how is this different from the scale of global warming? As in, the earth is big, but we still manage to change our environment in such a short timescale. Will this another underestimation of our ability to screw ourselves?