ugh.

i'm going to tell you a story. this is even better than the one about the great oxygenation catastrophe, i promise.

thousands of years ago, humans decided (an abuse of notation, surely) to slowly transition away from hunting (as well as gathering, let us not forget) and into living on farms. in the process, they did things like chop down trees to create grazing lands, and then increase the number of livestock living in those grazing lands. the number of humans also increased dramatically. the process, altogether, released a lot of trapped carbon into the atmosphere...

....which led to climate change. specifically, the rate of melting at the poles increased, and this created a rise in sea levels. cities were inundated and lost. it led to serious disruptions in the ways that people lived. the flooding was particularly bad around the persian gulf area, which for a time was swallowed by the sea.

we will probably never know what life was like in these earliest centers of human civilization. but, the earliest records that we have, the world over, identify these floods as a year zero. they may have been a event that brought people together in the face of crisis. the culture around the persian gulf created the stories around gilgamesh to mark this memory, which would eventually merge with a zoroastrian philosophy into the jewish scriptures and disseminate further from there. but, other cultures have similar stories that mark our ancient experiences with anthropogenic climate change.

this is not why we have rainbows. but, the next time a right-wing christian tells you that we can't change the weather, you might want to point out that their own religion is a consequence of exactly that.