> Your comment reads as a deflection from the fact that human activity IS the cause
If it comes across thus then I believe it has less to do with what I actually wrote, and more to do with a feverishly polarized discourse fuelled by US party politics where you either have to stay on a narrow path of accepted talking points or you must belong to "the dark side". The notion that climate change has not been rapid before is just one of the misunderstandings that flourish in such a debate climate.
As a matter of fact we will, for all conceivable future, have to be prepared to adapt to rapid climate change for whatever reason, be it because of interstellar events, volcano eruptions or simply because of tipping points reached as a consequence of a slow iterative change. It irks me that I have to repeat me total commitment to the abandonment of fossil fuel and the urgent adaptation of sustainable energy sources, just because I mention some basic facts that don't fit in the current feverishly polarized discourse.
But, for the sake of clarity; I do. The linked article is a prime example of how suppressing facts because they seem inconvenient for "the cause" opens up for the other side to seem "more scientific". It is simply not a good strategy.
I'm sorry but "we should be more adaptable" is clearly just misdirection from the actual thing at stake: the need to stop this insane rate of change caused by humans.
The fact that there were or will be future rapid changes is insignificant, considering their frequency and scale compared to human caused change. See the hockey stick graph or https://xkcd.com/1732/.
I don't know what feverish polarized politics you refer to since I'm not in the US but you have to understand that the words you are writing mirror the tactics used by big oil to delay change.
Those are good examples of partisan politics misinforming people about climate history, by leaving out 99% of it.
In fact, we're still below the historical average temperature on Earth and about 12C below the hottest times, as the following complete graph (500 million years) shows:
> The fact that there were or will be future rapid changes is insignificant, considering their frequency and scale compared to human caused change
As you can see on that graph, the scale of human caused climate change is smaller than many past natural climate changes. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, for example, began with a global mean temperature rise between 5C and 8C.
Without that the climate flux would likely be nowhere near as rapid, and we might not be scrambling to adapt.