A rock fall – 4,530 tons of rocks including a granite “slab” the size of a football field — came tumbling down below Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park at 6:55 a.m. on Oct. 8, 2008.

It fell from Glacier Point and it sent thousands of boulders tumbling down the talus slope into Curry Village.

There were 25 canvas tents and wooden cabins damaged or destroyed. Most were empty as Yosemite Institute students occupying them were at breakfast at the nearby Curry Pavilion. There were three injuries, all minor.

The extensive media coverage plus social media as well as pronouncements from government agencies and scientific concerns never once mentioned the words “climate change.”

Fast forward 15 years to another famous area of the earth’s crust molded by glaciers. This time it was June 11 of this year is the Silvretta Alps on the Swiss-Austrian border.

There was 3.5 million cubic feet of the mountainside that tumbled down. It ended up in a valley below as the equivalent of 40 Olympic swimming pools filled worth of rocks, mud, and dirt.

Just like in Yosemite where the endless cycle of freeze and thaw over the course of time breaks away bits of a mountain another water-related force — permafrost – is constantly reshaping the Alps.

None of this is news to geologists.

And, yes, it is part of climate change.

Most coverage — including reposts on Yahoo News — are measured.

Yet the headline on a Yahoo News story that appeared in the past few days on the rockslide in the Alps, “Mountains are collapsing: A Swiss mountain peak fell apart, sending 3.5 million cubic feet of rock into the valley below. Scientists warn climate change could make more mountains crumble.”

It’s pure clickbait. The now “emotionally charged” phrase “climate change” doesn’t appear until toward the end of the article.

The story makes it pretty clear that this is nothing new and that climate change — differences in temperatures that have helped shape the earth — is nothing new.

And if you “follow the science”:

• The United States Geological Survey (USGS) points out there have been at least five major ice ages that have included numerous cold stretches known as glacial periods and numerous warm stretches known  as interglacial periods.

• The first ice age started over 2.6 billion years ago.

• The earth is still within the latest ice age.

• Earth is now in an interglacial stretch of warming temperatures that started 11,000 years ago.

• There have been more than 40 cycles of glacial and interglacial — or cold-warm stretches — in the past 2.6 billion tears.

• The last period of glaciation of the current ice age reached its zenith 20,000 years ago.

Historically, as in the negligible 200,000 years mankind has been around in the 4.543 billion years earth has existed, rock falls occur roughly 80 times a year within the 1,169 square miles of Yosemite National Park.

The biggest, by the way, in recent history was on March 10, 1987.

It involved Three Brothers just east of El Capitan — the world’s eighth largest monolith (a single massive stone or rock) in the world.

When it ended, 600,000 cubic feet of rock had tumbled into Yosemite Valley.

It covered Northside Drive with up to 12 feet of debris and sent boulders to the southern side of the Merced River.

That was 35 years ago.

We are told, by the network partnership dubbed International Planet Protection Convention, that there are 670 million people worldwide living in high mountain areas.

The climate — whether it has the word “change” attached to it — has always put people living in such areas in danger from mudslides, rock falls, and other issues.

People have survived in such areas by adapting to the geology as well as the whims of nature.

They run the gamut from agricultural terraces — similar step-like terms on mountain sides — to fostering natural trees and pastures allowing those living in high elevations in the Andes as well as China thrive for more than 1,000 years by significantly mitigating geological and climate challenges.

Of course, for such strategies to work they need to be used.

The fact ancient Inca terraces worked for centuries and can still be found in the Andes in Peru some 11,500 feet above sea level is of no consequence to modern governments.

The insistence that modern experts in Lima know best and therefore should dictate development and climate policy has played out poorly in the Andes.

It also sounds eerily like Congress.

Modern farming techniques hatched in the flatlands along with modern road building and modern mining have accelerated the destabilization of the Andes.

Doing what mankind has never been able to do before — slowing down climate change — is just one part of the equation, according to scientists.

The other is preventing mountain degradation or of the environment in general.

That includes where we chose to live and what we chose to build.

There is a growing number of experts contending that there are significant diminishing returns after a certain point in addressing current climate change solutions such as the switch from fossil-based technologies to other forms of energy that often have various reliability issues or still require carbon-based fuel to power to create in a large degree.

It is why we need to address the issues that have the biggest impact and highest ability to improve the end game which one assumes is the future of mankind.

The endless list of breathlessly proclaimed climate change disasters are rooted in our ignoring geological and climate history and not whether we drive a gas-powered Ford Focus or a Tesla.

* Rock slides, as an example, were never an issue in the extremely lightly populated coastal stretch of Carmel to San Simeon until Highway 1 was built.

* Wildfires were drastically changed in how they were battled and the damage they do after the so-called wildland-urban interface was urbanized as well as higher elevations in mountain areas that are away from jobs and aren’t world-class resort material became a partial answer to California’s affordable housing crisis.

* Filling in low-lying wetlands along the ocean and bays.

The last one is no small detail.

Since 1850, 40 percent of what was then San Francisco Bay has been filled in including more than 80 percent of the regular total wetlands converted to other uses.

And the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta was effectively “claimed” with 1,000 plus miles of levees as opposed to being reclaimed given naturally it is supposed to be giant seasonal wetlands

As for the rock fall in Yosemite that has been shaped by several major periods of glacial cuts, that is part of the wearing down of mountains.

The very soil we live on today and the rest of the Valley was once part of the Sierra before climate, water, and other forces of nature did what they have been doing without assistance from man since the beginning of time — changing the face of the planet.

This column is the opinion of Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Courier or 209 Multimedia.