The conservative global warming deniers are now getting bit on their economic asses in Miami -- according to the Wall Street Journal, waterfront and near-waterfront houses are now being discounted because of slowly rising oceans and increasing instances of flooding. This is the free market doing it, not CNN.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-fears-reshape-miamis-housing-market-1524225600
There are other long-term real-world non-political tests of global warming as well. Since I first bought a home in Minnesota's St. Croix Valley in 1978, the gardening temperature/growing season guidelines for that specific area have gone up a full notch under the USDA guidelines. We have earlier and warmer springs, slightly shorter and warmer winters (though still cold) and this change has happened in a single generation.
IMHO, and I offer this thought with complete and humble charity, anyone who denies global warming is stupid.
John,
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the nature of this Climate Change debate. The terms 'Climate Change denier', or 'Global Warming denier' contribute to this confusion.
A climate Change denier is a person who knows absolutely nothing about climate. If people reading this are genuinely interested in the subject, the first fundamental piece of knowledge they need to acquire, as a starting point, is the fact that
climate is always changing. It always has changed in the past, and will continue to change in the future.
The real challenges that mankind face, with regard to climate change, is in
adapting to such changes, learning from history, and organizing our affairs in a way that protects us from the extreme weather events that have occurred in the past and can be expected to occur again in the future, regardless of slight changes in atmospheric CO2 levels.
Unfortunately, adapting, acting sensibly, and learning from history, is often too difficult and too expensive. It requires lots of cheap energy, a fair, egalitarian, and educated society, an efficient economy, and more politicians who have a background in science and engineering and who can explain to the population why certain measures that might appear unpopular are in fact in the best, long-term, interests of the nation.
The idea that we can control our climate by changing minuscule percentages of CO2 in the atmosphere, is ludicrous. However, I do understand that it's a very politicaly useful meme which can be used to protect the reputation of those in power.
For example, if the local government in a particular area allows people to build houses in a location that has been frequently flooded in the past, without imposing building regulations that require such houses to be protected from such floods and raised above the known levels of previous flood events in the area, then the government is clearly incompetent.
When the next flood occurs, perhaps, very sadly, causing a few deaths as well as massive property destruction, the media will tend to describe the event as the worst flood in living memory, or the worst flood ever recorded, or a once-in-a-century flood, and will reinforce the meme that this is yet another example of the effects of human-induced climate change due to rising CO2 levels.
This process, I admit, has a beneficial psychological effect. It protects the government from an angry backlash from the citizens affected -
"Why didn't you build more flood-mitigation dams during the last drought, knowing that the drought would eventually end and be followed by periods of heavy rain?" and
"Why did you allow us to build houses in a flood plain without informing us of the history of flooding in the area and explaining the need for elevated housing and changing the building regulations accordingly?'Those of us who have an inquiring mind and take the trouble to research the history of flooding in the area, by examining the data available in agencies such as the Bureau of Meteorology, which might go back a hundred years or more, and other research organizations which provide proxy data going back several centuries, usually discover that the latest flooding disaster was nowhere near the worst flood ever recorded.
A similar situation applies to the other types of extreme weather events, such as hurricane and droughts. It's very rare that any extreme weather event in modern times is actually the worst on record, in the general area, although it can sometimes happen, but probably because there are no reliable records that back far enough.
Whilst the delusion that using CO2 levels as a control knob to make the climate more beneficial, might be psychologically comforting for many people who are ignorant of the historical record of past weather events in their area, there will likely be negative effects to this delusion, such as increased electricity costs, which are currently an issue in Australia, and a tendency to continue to build inadequate housing with the false expectation that future reductions in CO2 levels will significantly reduce the severity and frequency of extreme weather events.
The reason I'm bothering to write all this, is because I genuinely feel compassion for future generations who will bear the consequences of such mismanagement.
