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With so much flooding in Florida, why is it a Republican state?
- Thread starter Nuclear Fusion
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what is your source of data for the "fact"
Point taken. Reality is difficult for some people to deal with. In this case, the data is the reality.
hardly reality, for every so called climate alarmist "expert" you can refer to, there is another "expert" ready to refute their claims. the only hard fact is that there are no real facts, just conjecture and opinions.
His statement is factually correct.
The sea level has been rising (are you arguing this point?).
The rising sea level is due to warming of the ocean (are you arguing this point?).
He never said it is or isn't anthropogenic. But the evidence on this one leans very heavily one way vs. the other. I won't waste my breath on this topic.
his statement referred to flooding, there is no sharp increase in any flooding in FLA.
my point is that you rose to defend his statement with a misstatement.
I see you later added this comment, and I googled, and apparently you're right -- Florida Disaster - The website for Florida disasters online - FloridaDisaster.com (assuming this site has accurate facts). It's about a flood every 3-4 years consistently over the last 40 years.
I appreciate your ability to get the facts and admit that your comment wasn't accurate.
You may want to look into "sunny day" or tidal flooding in coastal areas. Those have increased in frequency. A 2016 UM (Miami) study noted a consistent increase over the last decade.
The psychology of denial is ineluctably linked with the human condition. It is closely akin to the quasi-mythic, quasi-allegorical "frog in tepid-warm-hot-boiling water" story, which certainly is useful as analogy.
A supremely apt lesson is well-documented from central Pennsylvania; this is the sad story of Centralia, which lies atop a coal seam. Long prone to spontaneous combustion, which did not begin with but was exacerbated by mining, as the drifts and adits greatly increased the flow of oxygen to the coal, in the 1970s fires began that have not been extinguished to today, and are expected to persist for at least hundreds of years.
Residents of the town became inured to the consequences of the fires; these included hot! (>170ºF) u/g gasoline tanks at filling stations, basements catching fire, burning and CO-filled sinkholes appearing.... to any outsider, this town resembled an apocalyptic hellhole. As I personally can attest. But as recently as the last decade - a full generation later - some residents had refused to depart.
Although this story is well-known, it is not universally known. It should be. And it absolutely should be front-and-center attention not just to Florida, but to all.
A supremely apt lesson is well-documented from central Pennsylvania; this is the sad story of Centralia, which lies atop a coal seam. Long prone to spontaneous combustion, which did not begin with but was exacerbated by mining, as the drifts and adits greatly increased the flow of oxygen to the coal, in the 1970s fires began that have not been extinguished to today, and are expected to persist for at least hundreds of years.
Residents of the town became inured to the consequences of the fires; these included hot! (>170ºF) u/g gasoline tanks at filling stations, basements catching fire, burning and CO-filled sinkholes appearing.... to any outsider, this town resembled an apocalyptic hellhole. As I personally can attest. But as recently as the last decade - a full generation later - some residents had refused to depart.
Although this story is well-known, it is not universally known. It should be. And it absolutely should be front-and-center attention not just to Florida, but to all.
kingjamez
Member
Being a Republican who's family is from Florida I'd give two answers:
1. Being a republican doesn't mean you don't believe in climate change. There are MANY other tent poles that hold up the republican position.
2. Even being a believer in climate change, I have a (very) hard time assigning a specific event or events to be the effect of climate change. Convincing people who aren't "sure" is an exceptionally difficult thing to do.
I get irritated when people look at every weather anomaly and assign it to climate change. That hurts the credibility of the entire argument. It's a bit like crying wolf.
-Jim
1. Being a republican doesn't mean you don't believe in climate change. There are MANY other tent poles that hold up the republican position.
2. Even being a believer in climate change, I have a (very) hard time assigning a specific event or events to be the effect of climate change. Convincing people who aren't "sure" is an exceptionally difficult thing to do.
I get irritated when people look at every weather anomaly and assign it to climate change. That hurts the credibility of the entire argument. It's a bit like crying wolf.
-Jim
I had this same opinion until recently. A decade ago, this was true - we didn't have good scientific attribution methodologies. However, that has rapidly evolved. Today, the science is pretty reliable for extreme event attribution. A search for that term will turn up a lot of results showing how far we've come in recent years, especially from 2014-present.
Here is an interesting 8-minute piece from WNYC's On The Media that discusses how it has evolved, if you'd prefer to listen rather than read.
dhcp
Member
Any moment someone is going to use the word "racist" and someone else is going to blame Obama.
Any moment now.... (gets popcorn....)
Any moment now.... (gets popcorn....)
Good grief! I have little excuse for failing to spell-check my spell-checker. My best excuse is that I am a legal resident and registered voter in a city surrounded by Miami, thus I probably don't think the sea level is rising because I cannot read the century-long data in that area. Also most of my plants flower every years so I need not plant them anew. Much like that the problems we have described in this thread have been with us a long, long time and probably will remain with us.Oh, and by the way - there you go again. We need to adjust your spell-check.....
In the past the Democrats weren't so great, but these days a fair playing field favors them, so they are pushing for a fair playing field. Personally I prefer a fair playing field because it's fair.
I have thrown my lot in with the Democrats in recent years because the Republicans have gone off the rails in a major way. I generally agree with Democrats on social issues, and they have become much more fiscally conservative as the Republicans have become loony. Despite what the Republicans say, the last two Democratic presidents were fiscally rational and the 2 of the last 3 Republican administrations (the current administration doesn't have a track record yet so I don't count them, but so far they look loonier than all previous administrations combined) were borrow and spend to excess. The only fiscally responsible one was George HW Bush and people were angry enough to get rid of him after one term.
I do think that having a sane right of center party is a good counterweight to a sane left of center party. Unfortunately the Republicans party has gone insane and a lot of right wing news and issues are based on fictions like Obama's place of birth when he was president. So far I have seen very little based on actual fact going on with the current administration.
Actually California is an outlier, as it always is. As partial proof of that, I was born there
California has the rep, but the entire West Coast is an outlier. These days a lot of innovations come out of Oregon and Washington and California gets the credit for the innovation when they adopt them. California has led the way in some areas like clean air, but the NW doesn't have the problems California has in that area. Portland never gets smog and Seattle is smoggy only a couple of days a year.
But the redistricting that California uses now has been used for a couple of decades by Washington. The primary system where the top two candidates advance to the general election was pioneered by Washington when the Democrats and Republicans got the fully open primary system Washington had thrown out because it didn't help either party. 98% of Washingtonians liked the old system and didn't want it to go away, but the two parties made sure it was killed off.
Washington was the first state to approve gay marriage at the ballot box (though the SCOTUS decision soon after made it a moot point). Washington, along with Colorado was also the first states to legalize recreational marijuana. Oregon pioneered the right to die movement and won several political battles. After SCOTUS upheld it, Washington had it on the ballot and it passed by a large margin without comment. Oregon was also the first state in the US to go 100% vote by mail and Washington was the second. I think California is going there soon, California now is pretty liberal about allowing voting by mail like Washington was before they went all by mail. Washington does allow some in person voting, but basically you take your mail in ballot to a county office and vote there. Very few people do it.
Vote by mail increases turnout dramatically and allows people who can't get off work to vote on election day to vote in their spare time. I usually do it in an evening sometimes weeks before election day.
I read something years ago about how the most creative people have been migrating westward and a bit northward throughout history. The centers for creativity have tended to gravitate that way. Today many of the most creative places in the world are along the I-5 corridor from Washington to San Diego. Most car makers have design studios in Southern California. The aircraft industry took off on the west coast of the US with North American, Northrop, Consolidated, Douglas, Lockheed, and Boeing all in cities currently on I-5. The movie industry in the US started on the east coast, but relocated to Southern California early on for the better weather.
In recent times there has been a lot of high tech in that corridor. Seattle was the hub of the buildup of the cellular infrastructure. Most of the tech that went into supporting cells phones was developed in Seattle. The Seattle area also has Microsoft. San Diego has Qualcomm. Portland has a major development center for Intel and it was the home of Tectronics before Xeroxx bought them. Xerox keeps that facility open today.
SpaceX is where it is because that area is the hub for Areospace in the US. Of course the Bay Area has so many major tech companies founded there I couldn't possibly name them all. It started with Shotkey, HP, and Lawrence Livermore Labs. Xerox PARC was also a major spark for innovation in the Bay Area.
The flooding in Florida and the East Coast of the US has more to do with other things than global climate change.
Along the East Coast in general, pumping ground water for many generations has resulted in subsidence:
Sinking Atlantic Coastline Meets Rapidly Rising Seas
South Florida is particularly effected by continental tilt:
Post-glacial rebound - Wikipedia
The first is human's fault, but it's a local phenomenon created by overuse of ground water. The second is just Geology. We are due for an ice age, so if that does start, the problem will right itself as Canada gets buried under ice and Florida emerges from the sea again. Unfortunately it will make Canada uninhabitable and will vastly reduce the amount of usable farm land around the world, though there will be more land in warmer regions.
American political parties are coalitions of different groups who all get together under one tent. In a parliamentary system the coalitions are made by different parties in parliament, but in the American system the coalitions are formed outside under the banners of one of the two parties.
There are uneducated Democrats and a lot of big business people are Republicans, but the Republicans have a larger percentage of poorly educated whites than the Democrats. Polls have shown that Republicans tend to be less aware of political facts than Democrats or independents. More than educational level, this influences the political landscape in the US.
Many conservative news sources play to confirmation bias telling the audience warped or made up "facts" to confirm what they believe. Stephen Colbert called it "truthiness". A lot of consumers of conservative news sources stay in a bubble of those sources and don't venture outside of it.
Most moderates and liberals get their news from a variety of sources. There may be a healthy dose of opinion mixed into some of those sources, but usually there is a hard nugget of factual information at the core. There is confirmation bias on the left too. I run into it in some subjects, but most liberal opinions have some facts to back them up.
Back 40 years ago Science Fiction author Gordon R Dickson started writing a series of books he called the Chile Cycle
Childe Cycle - Wikipedia
The stories took place after humans had left Earth and populated other star systems, but his premise is happening today. In his universe the human race fractured into factions. There were some people who became uber scientists and inhabited a world dedicated to that. Another pair of worlds were inhabited by hyper religious groups. There were also mystics, and several other groups. That fracturing is happening today in this world, but we don't have separate physical worlds we can run off to. Instead we are inhabiting different mental spaces in the same physical world.
The mental space that a Trump voter from rural Wisconsin inhabits vs a Bernie supporter from Madison are totally different worlds. I would argue that the Bernie supporter could probably find more provable facts to support his or her positions, but some of the positions are tough to defend with facts too. Back when radio and TV news was limited to a handful of outlets that pretty much reported the same thing, the political debate was about what people thought of the facts.
Now people are consuming news that radically differs from the news other people gets because of the Balkanization of news. For some topics there is no common ground to even start a conversation. How do you reconcile two people one who believes the evidence Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 and one who believes he was born in Kenya after his mother gave up her citizenship and there is some kind of cabal that faked all the evidence he was born in Hawaii?
That's living in two separate universes and that is almost impossible to reconcile. Each side thinks the other is off their rocker. Nobody is going to bother to try and come to an agreement with someone they think is nuts.
This isn't just happening in the US. The entire world is seeing a rise of extremists in politics. The new president of the Philippines is one of the most extreme they have ever seen. After decades of relatively moderate governments Turkey is on the verge of becoming a complete dictatorship. Many European countries have seen the rise of extremist parties in recent years.
The world is splitting ideologically and instead of geographic boundaries like existed with the US civil war, the physical boundaries are harder to define, though there does tend to be an urban/rural split. That won't work as new political boundaries though. The rural areas can't exist without support from urban centers and urban centers starve without food from rural areas.
I don't know how this will all shake out. We are off into uncharted territory in a lot of ways.
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