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So just to be clear I am supposed to believe there is a God up there somewhere who is pulling strings and determining who survives an earthquake and who parishes but I'm not supposed to believe the very real scientific evidence that global warming exists? Yeah OK, sounds logical.
This could be true, but it wouldn't have been so bad....A warmer ocean promotes more evaporation, a stronger hurricane, and a hell of a lot more rain, hence the massive flooding that occurred...A wise man accepts science.
I accept that the Earth is getting warmer. It happens once every epoch or so. We are most certainly getting closer to the sun in our current orbital wobble. We also are doing a good job here on Earth of polluting the crap out of it. My suggestion is to buy a reliable air conditioner and ride out the next 10,000 years in comfort.
Yes, but its relative the general times one is living in too...at one time, 'mainstream science' had some pretty crazy theories they called facts...that were eventually proven to be wrong, so its likely 50+ yrs in the future, some things science today calls FACTS, will be proven to be nonsense.
Few people seem to understand this. One only has to look at what were considered "facts" over the past several hundred years to see that scientist were often incorrect.....REALLY INCORRECT. Remember the earth used to be flat!
Hate to tell you this but that hurricane would have formed even if the global climate was 2 degrees cooler than it is right now. There's this thing on Earth called evaporation, and with it comes thunder storms, and sometimes the wind is right and those storms become hurricanes, regardless of how much carbon is pumped into the atmosphere.
On one hand, you'd be right. Hurricanes did happen before and will continue to happen. In the case of Florence, she nearly broke part due to shear a few days before ultimately making landfall in NC.
But, in the time between, Florence passed over sea surface temperatures (SST) about 1-2°C higher than normal. SSTs are correlated with storm intensification (among other factors). As can be seen by the rapid intensification of the storm (85mph to 140 mph in under 24 hours), the SST were likely a large factor in this.
Now, think about what is now quite possible - what if Florence faced all that wind shear when it was closer to land and it was only a tropical storm. Maybe NC and SC didn't declare a state of emergency and call for evacuations. Maybe they still call for evacuations, but people ignore it because the storm is only a Tropical Storm. 18 hours later, it is a Cat-4 monster and makes landfall 6 hours after that. No time to evacuation, no time to prepare.
Funny thing (actually, not funny at all), that scenario I wrote out above is nearly what happened last year with Harvey.
7pm Aug 23rd: 35mph, forecasted to land as a Tropical Storm 48 hours later.
7am Aug 24th: only 12 hours later, 60mph now and forecasted to land in 36 hours as a Cat1 Hurricane
1pm Aug 24th: only 6 hours later, now 85mph and forecasted to land in 30 hours as a Cat 3 Hurricane
7am Aug 25th: 18 hours later, now 110mph, still forecast to land in ~15 hours as a Cat 3 Hurricane
10am Aug 25th: 3 hours later, forecast changes to a Cat 4 Hurricane landing in about 12 hours
My point is, people woke up on the morning of Wednesday Aug 23rd thinking that what was coming their way would be a "windy day with some rain" - and in about 40 hours, the forecast changed to "devastation." There was little time to prepare and little time to evacuate.
So yeah, hurricanes have been making impacts in the United States since well before it was the United States. But with cooler sea surface temperatures, we wouldn't be having Tropical Storms one day and Category 4 Hurricanes the next.
As anyone that has witnessed a hurricane, the difference between the two is huge.
the biggest problem we have in NC is all the transplants coming in and turning my state blue, its sad.
Been in NC for 40 years and I couldn't be happier the ignorant rural backwoods "folk" are finally being outnumbered by more seasoned transplants. Nowhere to go but up.
NC-20 wasn't a law, it was a private group of business owners and government officials in the 20 coastal counties of NC who were lobbying to use a less doomsday-ish estimate of sea level rise by the year 2100, what virtually every study had found as "certain" (40cm) versus "likely" (100cm), as the basis for compliance with the various federal laws concerning development, insurance, etc according to FIRM standards that were evolving because of H.R. 3370 – Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act.
It wasn't a denial of climate science via legislation. It was "use the least scary estimate as the basis for regulating actuarial rates because using the most scary estimates will add huge cost to development and insurance costs along the NC coast." The NC legislature agreed.
Nowhere do they deny sea level rise. They simply lobbied, successfully, to use "certain" estimates versus "likely" for regulating costs of building/development/etc in a flood plain zone.
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