There are useful things we can learn from civilizations that write things down. But there's no such record in California and the Pacific Northwest. Even basic facts like "there are enormous subduction earthquakes under Seattle, don't build a city here" took too long to figure out
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And part of figuring even that much out was thanks to good recordkeeping in Japan. So it's really hard to tell what 'normal' is on a scale much longer than the very brief history of modern recordkeeping. It's possible the whole idea of settling California was a mistake
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It's also possible that an increase in wildfires has to do with anthropogenic global climate change, or is part of normal long-term variations that have nothing to do with human activity, or is a combination of one superimposed on the other.
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Scientists have become better and better at finding traces of past weather events in the recent geological record to try to figure this stuff out, and these are some of the most exciting detective stories in the world. We should be funding all the science
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There will be some climate events with devastating impacts that have nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change, which is another reason to depoliticize the issue as quickly as possible. But I'm worried we're headed in the exact opposite direction there
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I read somewhere that mega-droughts and mega-floods are common on Earth, with unusual periods like since the last ice age, when the glaciers retreated to make the planet warm, but we retained ice caps to moderate the weather into stable seasonal patterns ...
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... while homo sapiens has been hunting and gathering for hundreds of thousands of years, only in this unusual period of annual climate stability have we managed agriculture and civilization. This bedrock to everything we know is ending in the next few decades.
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Reminds me of Robert Caro's description of Texas Hill Country.
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