You understand of course, that now the tides and the waves will be a meter higher. As will storm surges from future storms.
You also understand, of course, that part of the alarm is because that the more data that's collected and the more mature the models get, the faster and steeper the see level rise projections get (DeConto & Pollard, 3/2016, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v531/n7596/full/nature1...).
Another part of the alarm is the extent that the 2016 climate data thus far is worse than models predicted.
2106 data is meaningless. It's only a few months out of a many decades trend filled with noise. If you count that, then you also have to count all the months which had lower than predicted temperatures and use them to show the models are wrong. This is the bias I'm talking about. Cherry picking any bit of data that shows it's bad.
Of course a higher mean sea level means higher peaks too. But so what? New York survives occasional floods, and it can survive slightly more.
By the way, while I was researching that, I also found the "global greening" effect. This is what I'd like to see more of in mainstream media - interesting things happening with global warming that aren't all bad. It would show less of a bias.
One area I agree very much with the deniers is that our models are not very good. This worries me the most since we really have no idea what will happen and if we will hit any non-linearities. We are running a massive experiment on the whole planet with a very poor idea of what the consequences are.
AGW deniers, I think are hoping to derail the whole thing by showing that humans didn't cause it. But that's not the only skeptical view you can take. I think yours is about the same as mine.
> less calls to action
> less promotion of the tiny irrelevant bad things that it's doing
> less hiding of the good things it's doing
> more promotion of engineering solutions
So absolutely nothing to do with actual evidence then.
- less trying to convince people
- less calls to action
- less promotion of the tiny irrelevant bad things that it's doing
- less hiding of the good things it's doing
- more promotion of engineering solutions
The fact that the media presentation of it is so clearly biased in these ways makes me automatically distrust it. I know they're trying to mislead people, and you surely do too. Why would you believe someone who you know is trying to deceive you?
We have no reliable predictions of any serious consequences of global warming. According to the IPCC, it's not going to be a big deal within 100 years. Beyond that time frame, there's plenty of opportunity for us to adapt, fix it, or be wrong in our predictions.
The current estimate for sea level rise is about 70cm by 2100. That won't flood very much at all. A few sandbars, sprawling beaches and already-flood-prone river deltas, but not many actual cities. New York for instance won't be flooded by a 70cm sea level rise even though it was flooded by a recent hurricane. 70 cm is smaller than regular tide heights, smaller than wave heights, it's just not very significant for most coastal cities. Where it is significant, they can just build more land. I come from a city which has metal plaques on the road in the middle of town saying "this is where the shoreline used to be". We can just modify our shorelines with earthworks.
The current estimate for temperature rise is 2-6 degrees C by 2100. 6 degrees is the extreme case and probably won't happen, so maybe we get 3 degrees. What will that do to agriculture? I don't know, but we do know that food grows over a much wider range of climate across the world so it can't completely destroy it. Furthermore, it will come gradually, giving farmers many decades to adapt. What will it do to people directly? Nothing because it's negligible compared to daily and seasonal variations.
More tropical diseases? People in the tropics already suffer from those and we don't care about them today so why would we care about other people having them in the future?
More severe storms? We already have severe storms and construction in high risk areas is designed to cope with them. We'll just adjust the building codes as the risk changes.
Worried that people won't adapt until it really hurts them? No, property owners won't want to be left holding the bag when their land becomes worthless, so the market will sort that out. Whoever's farm stops producing or whoever's house get washed out to sea pays for it out of their own pocket so they'll be strongly incentivized to protect it or sell it long before that happens.
So this is my concern with global warming - yes it's happening and man-made or not, it probably won't hurt us enough to worry about. There's no room for that position in the 2-extremes view of the debate.