The headline was interesting, combining two facts: more than forty percent of the U. S. population lives in coastal counties, and sea level rise is accelerating.
People have differing opinions about climate change. That's normal for our species -- in an age of space travel, people have differing opinions about the Earth being a sphere or flat, after all. But while only twenty-four people have ever been far enough into space to get a really clear look at the big blue marble we live on, well more than a third of Americans can ride a bicycle to the sea shore and have a look for themselves, year after year. Far fewer will find themselves under water in the near term -- in many places, the land rises quite steeply from the shore, after all. Storm surges will be more of a problem, from the southernmost tip of Texas all the way around to New York City once in a great while, depending on the whims of hurricanes, themselves getting stronger and more frequent.
Call it climate; call it weather. Either way, the graph of water level over time says it's coming. Does the name matter when your beaches become scuba sites or you're sloshing around the ground floor of your house in gumboots, salvaging what you can from the storm?
It's certainly going to have an effect on the discussion.
Of course, we said that when men went to the Moon, and we're not out of flat-Earthers yet. Still, it's a lot harder to breathe water than to pretend geosynchronous communications satellites or the GPS and Starlink constellations are fake.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
2 comments:
I have no doubt that the climate is changing. It is always changing, in cycles we probably don't fully understand. We need to make adjustments and learn to deal with and mitigate the harmful results for human habitations.
What I don't believe (and I am NOT including you in this group Roberta) is increased collectivist/statist government intrusion into private lives, increased taxation, and reliance on wishful thinking about technology will have any affect on such changes. Which seem to be the go-to strategies of "climate change activists".
A general rule of thumb is that one cannot accomplish by legislation what one cannot do by persuasion. The repeated attempts by the Religious Right to law people into being Christians being one example, and the extreme fringe of environmentalism activism is another.
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