I understand what you're saying - climate has changed over the life of the planet, but this time the change is happening more dramatically more quickly. We are not the sole cause of climate change, but we are enabling it to happen. There are things we can do to slow it down or even reverse it, and most of that involves cutting back on the stuff we pump into the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels. All those emissions create a barrier that causes Earth to retain heat - which is why the ice is melting and the sea levels are rising. When a Senator tosses a snowball on the floor of the Senate, or when our new President tweets that "NY is cold - we need global warming!", that shows a total lack of understanding about what the problem is.
One of the biggest mistakes Gore made when he started his crusade, IMO, was to refer to it as "global warming", because although that's what's happening, what we're seeing is the effect - a changing climate. I didn't know what the heck he was talking about until I started doing my own research and realized the connection. It's hard to convince a skeptic that Earth is getting warmer when they're sitting in the dead of winter - but as I said in the OP, that's weather, not climate. Climate is weather patterns over time, and anyone who can't see that our weather patterns are changing has got their head in the sand.
Can we do anything to change it? I don't know, but we can at least try by not making things worse. To just sit back and say, "we didn't create it and there's nothing we can do to fix it" is just crazy, IMO. I'm not really looking forward to the prospect of having ocean-front property here in Dallas...
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