Reply #5: Pretty much it speaks to things past.

[Igel]

There's also the problem that myths are only taken to speak to things that we suspect happened; we take them to support what we already suspect. "Noah's flood", like Homer's Troy, is purely mythical--until there's something we can hang it on. Then it becomes pseudo-historical, not because we think myth always reflect the past or we believe oral traditions are always true but because we have some sort of independent evidence for a fact that we can relate the myth to.

Noah's flood's been "hooked" to a few incidents. In one or two cases, it's the primary evidence for some hypothesized but unattested event; in other case, it's supporting evidence for something hypothesized.

We know that oral traditions can be horribly mutable and malleable. The problem is there's no a priori way to identify when they've been changed. Whether or not they're reliable depends on whether you assume they're reliable in most cases.

Then again, we never balk at altering and changing any elements of a myth that's needed to reduce it to supporting evidence, to regard elements (or the entirety) as purely metaphorical as our fancy dictates.

How much myths speak to AGW is a question. That we can interpret them to echo changes as the current interglacial started speaks to climate change. But many, if not most, AGW-deniers still accept that there have been ice ages and many say the climate is changing but say man either isn't responsible at all or at least primarily for climage change. (The article, in other words, strikes at a nice overgeneralization in straw-man's garb.)