Under Water

As a resident of the State of Florida, I found the following Reuters news item to be unintentionally comical:

If nothing is done to combat global warming, two of Florida's nuclear power plants, three of its prisons and 1,362 hotels, motels and inns will be under water by 2100, a study released on Wednesday said.

In all, Florida could stand to lose $345 billion a year in projected economic activity by 2100 if nothing is done to reduce emissions that are viewed as the main human contribution to rising global temperatures, according to the Tufts University study.

That equals about 5 percent of what economists project the state's gross domestic product will be by the end of the century.

On its face, this, and literally thousands of similar MSM “news” reports, are an example of climate change hysteria, but they’re also representative of something that is even more troubling—a belief in a static world, one in which there is no technological, societal, or political change.

One hundred years (well, actually 93 years if you’re counting) is a very long time. To put this in perspective, horse drawn carriages were the primary source of transportation 93 years ago and the dominant pollutant was … horse manure. The average life span in the US was 50 years, women did not have the right to vote, antibiotics had not yet been invented, electricity was a new-fangled idea and telephones, radio, and the like were future technologies.

The hubris that is exhibited among those who are climate change alarmists is astonishing. Although they believe they are being proactive and looking to the future, in reality, they have a static world view. They believe that their time and place is so important that nothing will change.

It is a virtual certainty that within the next century, advanced technologies will make clean energy available across the globe and that the primitive and grossly inaccurate models of global climate will be replaced by more accurate models that might predict a radically different environmental result. It is within the realm of possibility that any environmental damage that has been done might be undone by advancements as yet unknown. One hundred years is a very long time.

If reports like Reuters' weren’t so funny, they would be insulting to those of us who recognize that things will change dramatically over the next century.

Let’s put it this way, I live a little over 4 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Even after reading the Reuter’s piece, I don’t intend to buy a life boat just yet.