If we're going to have hammerhead sharks breeding in our backyards it would be appreciated if you didn't delete your large science-based rebuttal. Please re-type it and at least PM it to anybody you assume to be a flat-earther here.
Okay, since you asked. I'm going to actually take the time to write out a proper response to this like I'm talking to somebody who
hasn't been openly mocking me when I hadn't said
anything to you to provoke you first, for the last however many pages, and I would appreciate a similar consideration. If you don't agree with me, fine, just say so and we'll both move on like adults, okay?
I actually had something to say in response to your snow comment yesterday but first one thing: your hammerhead comment here is an example of the disconnect between your opinion and my opinion (and that of some other people in here). You have a habit in this thread of using big examples for emphasis that nobody here has actually been arguing. No one here is saying Florida's going to be underwater or something, the only reason that it was brought up at all is that there's a general understanding that sea level rise and more frequent storms, IF they are happening (and the sea level rise is measurably happening there, the local universities have been measuring it for decades:
https://climatecenter.fsu.edu/topics/sea-level-rise), would cause more frequent and more severe local floods because Miami's drainage situation is already a shitshow. Not city underwater. Yes possible problems for local fruit growers.
The people who are saying climate change is real
in this thread are talking about
trends and
averages that cause effects that are expensive and difficult
but not apocalyptic within anybody's lifetime here and probably not afterward either. I get why you're doing it, but is disingenuous to paint the arguments as such. I don't believe Florida's going to be underwater, the OP doesn't believe that, nobody commenting here believes that, or at least if they do I think they're wrong too. Based on hard data. Well previous to this discussion I've looked at worst-case 6-degree-warmer-globally projections of sea level rise where all the polar ice caps and permafrost would be melted all year, and most of Florida is still above water even then. Probably even if that happened, engineers could figure something out. Seems like they're already trying to (
https://miami-dade-county-sea-level-rise-strategy-draft-mdc.hub.arcgis.com/)
Similar issue with the snow comment, which actually is an issue in my back yard. Let's take a look at that for a second because that was one thing I was originally responding to last night:
Careful now! The "Snow is a thing of the past" and "Children just won't know what snow is" predictions were quickly shot down by reality so they've gone from instilling fear of Global warming to instilling fear of Climate change.
Okay. So here's the issue I think. You're responding here to a big batch of headlines that I've seen too over the last however many years talking about "snowless winters". Here's one of the usual for reference, pretty much the usual clickbait crap:
https://brightly.eco/blog/scientists-warn-winter-without-snow-is-comingThat article is trash, it's full of the kind of overblown over-simplistic takes you've been making fun of, and so are most of the articles writing about that subject, because headline writers don't typically read science papers either even when they're referencing them. Their job is to get people to pass around ragebait on social media.
That said, let's actually look at the scientific study most of these articles have been referencing when they say "no snow" for a second. Most of these breathless "no snow" articles (including the one that I linked to, which again is garbage) have either been referencing this study or one of the studies that it is analyzing:
https://rdcu.be/cAivmIt's a 20 page article which is full of jargon but they tried to sum up the main points at the beginning. If you look at "Key Points" on page two, that is a really far cry from what comes to mind when most people think "no snow". It's one study, looking at one area (Western US), and the only actual prediction is 25% less snowpack average by 2050.
Again, this is the actual science article that all those dumb headlines have been referencing (either that or New York and the East Coast seeing less snow
on average over the last hundred years, but unlike the Western United States that isn't likely to impact the food supply so f' it).
Just to be fair to your comment, I *did* go hunting for any research
at all in the past that predicted no-snow winters being common or the norm by 2023 or earlier (that paper I linked puts them at anywhere from 2035 to 2090 or not at all), but they don't exist as far as I can tell. If somebody ever told you that we'd be seeing "no snow" by now (which needs qualifiers, like, where? What states? Etc), they weren't a scientist or citing any actual science. I can absolutely believe some idiot newspaper writer might have churned out something like that once, though.
Anyway. 25% reduction is both way less than "no snow ever again", BUT ALSO it's a huge amount of decrease for us regionally. Most of those projections are based on the average over the last 70 years, in which we've seen a 15%-25% decrease which has been enough to drop Lake Powell and Lake Mead (major water resevoirs and power generation) to less than 25%. Someone else referenced that earlier in thread.
The problem isn't one dry year. We could have no water all year for a year, probably for a few years, as a freak act of god, and we would recover. It's that trendline that keeps going down down down for over seventy years now. The reverse is also true, big freak snow years don't fix it. We had a TON of snow this year in areas that feed the Colorado River (150% above twenty year average), which is the center of the entire water infrastructure of the west of the country, and those major resevoirs went from about 23% to... 26% full. Record snow, literal drop in the bucket. But I'm still hearing people (not here, but elsewhere) say things like "well since it snowed so much I guess the drought's over". It isn't yet. Check again in ten years.
And like the flooding thing, this isn't about some apocalypse scenario in anybody's lifetime. It
is potentially about trillions of taxpayer dollars completely reworking the water distribution in the western united states, it's about higher food costs, and it's about water cost increases and potential water rationing that's going to make it harder for (to bring this back around to the forum here) people in the southwest and California subtropics to take advantage of our otherwise somewhat favorable climates to grow anything besides cactus. That sucks. I don't want to deal with that. Nobody wants to deal with that.
Anyway, my central point here is that actual science that those stupid clickbait headlines are mangling are
actually about slow but measurable changes that we can see (rising sea levels worse in some areas than others, decreasing snowpack decade by decade), and that are making areas with certain vulnerabilities have non-apocalyptic problems. And most of the people in here who
don't believe in climate change are, instead of responding to that, talking about overblown apocalypse-like scenarios that they probably heard on the news ten years ago. That disconnect makes it hard to talk about current reality.
I'm willing to blame a lot of this disagreement on the news media, honestly. Left, right and center. They've all done a garbage job of communicating, or even intentionally obfuscated, what is ACTUALLY being measured and what people are doing their best to predict based on those measurements. Instead, they're all running stupid b.s. headlines and making fun of the other side's stupid headlines and framing difficult systemic issues (I don't think "just stop using petroleum, bro" is as easy or feasible as some people wish it was) as either nonexistent or simple to fix by just buying a Prius and turning off the water while you brush your teeth.
And just for the record, at no point did I actually have anything positive to say about that stupid racism news article that Calusa linked, even though you referenced me when making fun of it. I actually went and read that thing and the central idea was actually "hotter temps and systemic breakdowns of things like water supplies are going to effect poor people and people at the equator more, and there's a whole lot of darker-skinned poor people at the equator", which is kind of like "well no s*** sherlock". I don't want to debate that since I don't agree with a bunch of other conclusions in there either and it isn't relevant to what we do here except distantly so, I'm just repeating what is actually in there. Just because I believe in carbon-driven climate change based on the research made available to me, doesn't mean I uncritically accept every scrap of editorial ragebait that somebody slaps a dumb headline on. And that's probably true of everyone else in here who's expressed a belief in climate change in this thread, too.
TLDR: People in here who believe in climate change are mostly expressing concern about
trends causing small but significant or expensive changes that mess up our ability to grow stuff, I don't believe that any actual scientist has ever said children are going to forget what snow looks like and so I don't think that's been disproven,
the actual science is usually not saying what headlines are saying, and also the news sucks at actually informing people.
I'll be glad to respond calmly to anything that's an actual critique of anything I actually said as opposed to mockery, otherwise I'm pretty much done with this subject aside from congratulating Julie when the city fixes her issue. I've said everything I wanted to say.