It is, however, a Category 1 storm. On a five point scale. I have stayed in my house 50 feet from the water during Category 2 and 3 storms and never lost electricity. Just sayin.'
But that is not to say it wont be dangerous. Lots of people chuckled at Hurricane Irene in 2011. It wasnt much of a storm, but then the resultant flood damage from extraordinary rains destroyed entire towns in Vermont and upstate New York.
The larger implication is, however, that people are waking up to the reality of climate change. Tornadoes, floods, tropical storms, drought. You name it, the world has been hit with it in the past few years. And not just in poor developing countries that always seem to get more than their fair share of trouble. The US and Europe have gotten hit. And within the US, not just those trailer parks in remote Great Plains states, but communities with lots of cable channels, and strip malls and youth sports. The kind of places where This Is Not Supposed to Happen.
So lots of People Like Us, who take their Starbucks grandes skinny, dress conservatively - and probably vote that way too - are starting to rethink this whole climate change thing. Even Republicans - as many as 50% in some polls - are willing to concede that there may be something to these claims that the environment has a screw loose and humans might conceivably have had a hand in it.
Reality is a powerful influence. JL
Carl Franzen reports in TPM:
The percentage of Americans who say there is “solid evidence” of global warming is the highest its been in the past five years, at 67 percent overall, a new study from the Pew Research Center The 67 percent who agreed that there is “solid evidence that the earth’s average temperature has been getting warmer over the past few decades,” is up from 63 percent in 2011 and up 10 points from the nadir of 57 percent in 2009. It’s the highest since 2008, when 71 percent said they believed the Earth was heating up.
The rebound in belief of global warming was seen across party lines, with 48 percent of self-identified Republicans saying there was evidence of global warming, up from 35 percent in 2009. Democrats, too, were up at 85 percent this year from 75 percent in 2009.
Pew pointed out though that a political disparity was slightly more evident in the Presidential election, with 88 percent of President Obama supporters saying they recognized evidence of global warming compared to 42 percent of Romney supporters indicating the same.
There also remains a lack of consensus with respect to the cause of increasing global temperatures, though more this year believe it’s human caused (42 percent), than last (38 percent) and in 2010 (34 percent).
Overall, 64 percent of Americans said they think of global warming as a “serious problem,” Pew found.
Pew’s study, which surveyed 1,511 adults from October 4 through 7, comes on the heels of a recent report from the Carbon Disclosure Project indicating that most of the top 500 companies in the world also view global warming as a serious threat to their business going forward, but that only a few have concrete plans in place for minimizing their own contributions to it.
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