yeah, it blows my mind when people in the continental climates of the US sort of assume that it will manifest as a gentle warming.... and not even more pronounced, violent swings and variability with events pushing outside of historic patterns and extremes (in an area already prone to extreme shifts). and what really blows about the US, compared to other places, is we don't even have a cultural context for extreme events anyway because we genocided the people that lived here and have made every effort to ignore or delete their histories, so people are just casually resistant to warnings.

i went to a symposium one time and listened to this talk by an outreach-oriented climatologist that was working in AZ and he talked about how his messaging about adaptation strategies had to change between audiences of white ranchers and audiences of native ranchers. older white ranchers shut off when "climate change" is mentioned, while older native ranchers were easy adopters, with some groups saying, "yeah, we have an oral history about this/[specific areas] being devastated by [y], so we'll work out some communal land swap [or whatever]."

so we're stuck with a scenario where understanding what has happened here is, for most, based on just 500 years, at max. meanwhile, real paleoclimatology / geology nerds have to live with knowledge about things like ARkStorm and try to walk around like a normal human without occasionally blurting out "we're all gonna die probably because it turns out there are catastrophic events that happen every several hundred years, and climate change is going to make the next one even worse."