Rising sea levels are an existential threat to Pagosa Springs!
I’ll get back to that in a minute.
If your initial reaction to that alarmist first sentence was “What is he talking about?”, and wanting to look up ‘existential’, you know how I felt when the media parrots monotonously repeated Nancy Pelosi’s inane talking point that impeachment of President Trump was urgent because he was an “existential threat” to our republic. I’ll save you looking up “existential”. It means “relating to existence”.
I doubt Pelosi, or the parrots, knew what existential meant before they read it off a tele-prompter. But it appeals to the egos of her intellectual elitist supporters, and attempts to disguise from the common-folk her belief that Trump’s existence as President (and those who voted for him) is a threat to her socialist agenda – to which us normals respond “Damn right! That’s why we elected him!” Using big words to sound smarter than us is how progressives roll. Pretense to intellectual superiority is in their DNA.
See how easy it is? I could have said “believing they are smarter than us”, but “pretense” had more gravitas. Oh man — I can’t help myself! Before I retired I only used Latin in my legal writing, but since becoming a professor it oozes out all the time. That’s how academia warps the mind ! But I’ve gone far enough down this rabbit hole, so back to the topic at hand — how rising sea levels are a threat to Pagosa Springs.
If the sea level ever threatens to inundate my Aspen Springs hilltop it will be time to start building a big boat and gathering animals “two by two”. But here in Florida rising seas are not just a biblical allegory – we can see it happening. The media regularly run breathless warnings about the coming diluvial apocalypse accompanied by photos of the Carribean beginning to reclaim the Keys.
I don’t dispute the sea level is rising. What I reject is that it’s being caused by humans, or that there is anything we can do about it.
If you have ever been to Tallahassee, Florida, you’ve seen the state capitol building on the highest hill in town. https://www.flickr.com/photos/guyclinch/24720437325
That ‘hill’ is part of the ‘Cody Scarp’, a vestige of the Pleistocene coastline.
http://publicfiles.dep.state.fl.us/FGS/FGS_Publications/FGS%20Library%20Documents/Cody%20Scarp%20Upchurch.pdf
Tallahassee is over 30 miles from the present day Gulf coast.
At my east central Florida home, I’ve built landscaping retention walls out of coquina rock
https://www.nps.gov/casa/learn/historyculture/coquina-the-rock-that-saved-st-augustine.htm
quarried from my property when we built the house. We sit atop a coquina ridge, that once was the coast. We’re nearly 10 miles inland from the present Atlantic shoreline. The coquina ridge I’m on, and the Cody Scarp in Tallahassee, are irrefutable geological, topographical evidence that the sea level used to be significantly higher than now.
Earth’s sea levels have been rising and receding for epochs, and will continue to do so. It’s a natural cycle that is out of our hands. Yet climate change cultists tell us that unless our taxes are raised, and we quit driving our private cars, we are all doomed. According to them, to prevent the sea from rising into the bungalows of Key West millionaires… or art-deco McMansions of Miami South Beach glitterati… you in Pagosa Springs, Colorado have to embrace socialism – and stop driving to Durango to see a medical specialist.
That’s why sea levels are a threat to Pagosa Springs. Not from rising water, but from the climate change jihadists’ efforts to create their dystopian world that you will have to help pay for, and try to survive in. Climate change is merely a pretext for imposing their vision of totalitarian socialism on us all.
I remember back in the 1970s, the climate crowd were predicting a new ice age if we did not quickly change our ways.
When that didn’t happen when they predicted it would, they switched to global warming, until after a couple record cold winters and their mantra again morphed into ‘climate change’. Who could possibly argue that the climate is not changing? It always has, and always will.
By adopting generic climate change every natural weather event can be a call to action. Like the TV weatherman saying there is a possibility of rain tomorrow (so that he is never wrong) climate change cultists claim infallibility, while those of us skeptical of their shape-shifting “science” are disparaged as heretical “deniers”. Despite their self-professed superior intellects they are utterly incapable of distinguishing that we aren’t denying the climate is — only their silly totalitarian solutions.
As a glass-half-full guy, I’ve taken a positive view of parts of Florida reverting to seabed. Since my home sits atop the old shoreline the rising sea will eventually turn it into beachfront, substantially enhancing my property value. So I owe it to my heirs to bequeath them appreciating-in-value property.
But not a socialist nightmare society created in a futile attempt to impede the inevitably encroaching Atlantic Ocean.
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.