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Thoughts on global warming and New York's Scoping Plan [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-09-17  

I am posting some letters to the editor here, for improvements and suggestions, before I send them. Length is not an issue as this is an online publication and these are less long winded than most he publishes. I was planning on posting 3 on successive days. The site is a news site, and as apolitical as you can be in this day and age. There won’t be much new to Daily Kos readers, since the audience is the general public and generally less informed. These are a reply to our local representative Tom O’Mara, who has been disparaging New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, New York’s attempt to meet scientist’s climate goals. The law attempts to reduce carbon emissions 40% by 2030 and 85 percent by 2050. That’s a hard but doable thing.

The first one is simply an argument that global warming is real.

Why I take Global Warming Seriously The reason that I “trust” the scientists about global warming is that they have been consistently right for forty years. In the 1980s, and before, Climate change had not started in earnest, scientists made many predictions on the future effects of climate change. Scientists said the earth would get warmer, it has. They predicted the ice caps would melt, they are. They said mountain glaciers would disappear, they are, and that coral reefs would bleach, in rising seas. We are now on the fourth world wide bleaching event, and sunny day floods are a thing. They said droughts would get more serious, anybody looked at the price of food lately. Rain, when it falls, is supposed to fall more intense rainstorms, anybody notice that. There are many more predictions, like more wildfires, check. Hurricanes were expected to become stronger, but not more numerous (check). There are also some interesting details in the predictions that can be checked. Nights were supposed to warm faster than days. This has occurred, and it is one of the reasons we know that the sun is not the cause of global warming. The poles were supposed to warm faster than the tropics something which has also happened. It is a long list accurate predictions. In contrast the denial side of the argument has been consistently wrong for about the same amount of time. Does anybody remember that global warming stopped around 2010, it didn't. I don't know how many times global warming was supposed to stop because of solar effects. Satellites didn't detect warming in the upper troposphere, now they do. The denialists said that all the evidence was in computer models, well now those models have been shown to be essentially correct. They have consistently acted as if climate change was a mystery that needed to be solved. Unfortunately, it is happening as expected. The gold standard in science is making a prediction and have it be shown by experiment. This is an experiment that should not have been run, but the predictions are coming true QED.

The second day would be this one.

Why I Think Global Warming is Going to be a Horror Show Since about twenty years ago, after the fact of human influenced climate change had been proven, the question became “would it be bad or very bad?” It looks like the“very bad” side is winning. There haven't been big changes in the estimates of increased temperature, but the expected punishments caused by those increases have been increasing steadily. Global warming is already causing problems. The five year average inflation adjusted costs of United States weather disasters has increased from 14.2 billion in 1985 to 123.4 billion in 2023, a rate 2.5 times the growth of GNP. That's $360 dollars a year for every person in the US last year vs. $58 dollars for every person in 1985. You can't attribute any single event to global warming, but there are many more events, and you can attribute the the vast majority of the increase in damage to global warming. There are no other suspects. Earthquakes, which are not associated with global heating, do not show the same increase in damage. The way these costs are starting to manifest themselves in ordinary life is increases in homeowner’s insurance rates, especially in the states of Florida (hurricanes, and fire and floods) and California (fires). Insurers are looking for and getting bailouts, but even with that, property insurance rates in “Florida are predicted to jump at least 40% in 2023, according to the Insurance Information Institute. ”In California “new home buyers and people getting dropped from their existing coverage have had a tough time finding homeowners insurance this summer in California as more and more major insurers s top writing new policies in the state.” This increase has been nationwide, because one of the types of damage increasing the most has been from billion dollar thunderstorms which increased from an average of about 1 per year in the 1980s to 19 in 2023. These, as everybody knows, can occur anywhere. The national flood insurance program is, as always, in need of a bailout. One surprise, related to global warming, is that the Maldive Islands are not sinking into the waves. Sea level rise hasn't slowed, but the islands are able to add material from their coral reefs allowing them to maintain their area. But climate change has more than it's share of unpleasant surprises. One recent one is, that since septic systems need a space between them and the water table in order to function, sea level rise is going to make septic systems over a large areas unusable. In Miami this is already a 3 billion dollar problem. Another surprise is that global warming is affecting the price of food. Global warming is making dry areas dryer and wet areas wetter, so the west is facing running out of water in the worst drought in 1200 years. The drier areas of Africa are facing the worst drought in a hundred years. Coffee and Chocolate are two very important commodities that are facing severe difficulties. “Global cocoa supply is anticipated to decline by almost 11% to … compared with 2022-23.” This doesn't seem like a surprise, since anything that changes the whether affects food prices. But the official calculations of damages, used by governments didn't expect any damages till the next century. Unprecedented, a word you expect when once in a thousand year events become once in a hundred year events, is being heard too often recently. Since it is in our power to prevent the worst effects of climate change, it makes sense to do it.

The last one is about the act, and why I support it.

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