I was speaking last evening, late, with a friend that recently retired from the federal government's National Weather Service and told him what I thought--that all it's going to take, I expect, is one more hit, one hit in Florida of some major city, heaven forbid, and finally, finally more people will think there likely is a good chance of humans effecting weather with all the CO2 we're putting into the atmosphere.
Heaven forbid it's Miami but there it sits, like a bit of a big bullseye, jutting out into big bodies of water.
Purely coincidentally, after I wrote this entire piece, I ran across this article:
As hurricanes loom, Florida insurance lives on borrowed time
Because of its size and geographical position, with 1,200 miles of coastline on a peninsula sticking out into the warm waters where the Caribbean meets the Atlantic, Florida is a uniquely risky insurance market. Most of its insured residential and commercial property - 79 per cent - lies in coastal areas vulnerable to both wind damage and flooding.
Coastal property is valued at just under $3 trillion, according to a report due to be released next week by AIR Worldwide, a global leader in catastrophe risk modeling. Florida accounts for almost 30 percent of the nation's entire $10 trillion coastal exposure, AIR found.
Only New York has as much exposure, with $3 trillion in coastal property, and that compares to $239 billion in South Carolina and $107 billion in Georgia.
Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Daytona, you name it. When/if that should happen, it'll be game over for Florida, if it's a big enough storm. There will be lots more believers.
In the meantime, there's Oklahoma and Oklahoma City, repeatedly hit by tornadoes in the last week.
Did you know there were 9--nine tornadoes in the last 36 hours?
And in the last 24 hours, there was this:
5 dead in tornado in Oklahoma City area, 50 hurt
And that, of course, is on top of the direct hit the suburb of Oklahoma City took in Moore, the previous week.
At what point do we think maybe the way we humans live on this planet maybe isn't sustainable?
At what point do we maybe think we need to stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?