Btw, I still think we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The possibility that it won’t affect us doesn’t justify the fact that it will almost definitely create a global disaster for future generations. I just like playing the devil’s advocate.

So it gets hotter. Big whoop. We need air conditioning 365 days/year instead of 357. It’s not like it could possibly get more humid than 100%. Even when it’s 65, we still need to run the AC because it’s 99% humidity. There’s a certain wet bulb temperature point at which you just can’t really be any more miserable outdoors than you already are… and for most of the year, we’re well past that point anyway.

Less rain? Hell, if it rained less and became less humid, that’s cause for *CELEBRATION*. It means we’d have NICER WEATHER than we have now.

Food? Please. 99% of the food at Publix ALREADY comes from Arizona, Georgia, Mexico, Nebraska, and China. In the grand scheme of things, food grown in Dade County is basically irrelevant to the daily lives of consumers here. Plus, in 50 years, there won’t BE farms LEFT in Dade County, because every square inch of land outside the Everglades will be urbanized, and the last farmer will have long since sold the farm to Lennar and retired to a resort town somewhere in Mexico.

I don’t even think most of the CITRUS sold here is from Florida, because most Florida citrus goes straight to frozen orange juice concentrate, and the waste gets used to make the cheap Triple-Sec and vodka. Florida citrus isn’t pretty enough to wax and sell as citrus because it’s not a uniform orange color. Besides, at the rate Orlando is sprawling, there won’t BE any citrus groves LEFT in 50 years, because the land they’re on will all have been sold to developers for condos and golf courses.

Water? That’s why the Army Corps of Engineers invented Lake Okeechobee. It’s REALLY a big artificial reservoir. If push came to shove, we could just dike the entire everglades and turn it into an even BIGGER reservoir… filling up when we have hurricanes, draining off when we have dry years. Of course, the environmentalists would go into convulsions by that point… but you could almost count THAT as a bonus

Hurricanes? That’s why god invented reinforced concrete, and made it available for roof-building. If hurricanes become a common event, within a decade or two we’ll have engineered them into irrelevance (buried utilities. concrete roofs, aquarium-glass storefront windows, etc). Think about it… in Dade County, a direct hit by a Category 1 hurricane that would cripple half the state of North Carolina for a week is roughly equivalent to a “snow day” in upstate New York. The hardening process has already begun.

In the grand scheme of things, some areas will be harmed by climate change. Other areas will benefit. America’s a big country, with plenty of climactic diversity. If Nebraska turns into a desert, who’s to say Alaska and North Dakota won’t bloom? If Florida dries up, maybe Nevada will turn into a jungle. In the end, it doesn’t matter, because NOTHING we do will make the slightest bit of difference anyway. Rather than waste resources trying in vain to preserve the status quo, we might as well embrace it and find creative new ways to profit and benefit from it.

Also, I read the study finally and it doesn’t say anything necessarily bad about our region. It predicts that we will have a “novel” climate (or new climate). Since species in tropical climates experience little variation, they have become more vulnerable to climate change. Then when a new climate comes along, these species are replaced with better adapted species.

Since Miami has already been taken over by Australian Pines, Cattails, Pepper trees, Iguanas, Boa constrictors, and a variety of other invasive species, the effects of a “novel” climate will just be more of the same.

Relax. It won’t be. The most pessimistic scenario imaginable (from reputable scientists quoted at wikipedia, at least) is 2-3 feet of rise by 2100, absolutely positively worst-case runaway-global-warming-max… and it would be pretty hard to “achieve” even THAT much of a rise. A foot, maybe, is the most likely rise. By the time sea levels rise 10 feet, the human race will have either colonized Mars, or been destroyed by a planet-killing asteroid anyway.

In all likelihood, if nobody pointed it out to you, you won’t even notice any year to year change. Over the span of a decade, you might notice an old measuring stick lashed to a dock now reads an inch or two higher than you remember it being long, long ago… but even then, you wouldn’t be sure unless you’d written it down a decade earlier.

Why? Most northern-hemisphere ice is floating, and already occupies most of the space it would take up if fully melted. Remember, most of an iceberg is underwater, and frozen water takes up slightly more room than liquid water. And that ice represents just a tiny volume of overall ocean volume.

Even if Greenland and Antarctica routinely started having summers as hot as Miami’s, thick ice sheets don’t melt overnight. Or even over decades. Remember, as the outermost ice melts, it turns to water. From that point, additional energy gets divided between melting more ice and warming the already-melted ice so it evaporates.

The pictures of retreating glaciers that climate-change extremists show all the time are of glaciers that were barely glaciers anymore to begin with, and were on their way out since the last ice age anyway. Full-bore rapid deglaciation is roughly a mile of retreat per year. For most glaciers, it’s measured in feet per year. At either rate, Greenland and Antarctica are really, REALLY big, and it’s going to take a really, REALLY long time to deglaciate them… assuming winter snowfall didn’t undo most of the previous summer’s melting. And while I’m at it, roughly 1/4-1/3 of Antarctica’s glaciers are floating ice, too. So unless Kim Jong Il decides to throw a few nukes at Greenland and Antarctica (which probably WOULD accelerate things a bit by pumping massive amounts of water vapor into the air), the inrushing tsunamis of hundred-foot waves due to rising sea levels speeding towards land to flood our cities is a myth.

Are sea levels likely to rise? Yes. Are they likely to rise faster than the Army Corps of Engineers can beat them back into submission? No. Fearmongering aside, you’re not going to look out the window tomorrow and see fifty foot tsunamis inundating Miami due to global warming. Nor next month, year, decade, or century.

The study concludes that the tropics/subtropics throughout the world will be one of the most affected areas by global warming. South Florida falls within this category, however it is predicted we could have a different climate from, say, Indonesia, even though both areas may suffer equally from climate change.