Under Rick Scott, Florida officials can't use the term "climate change"

[Donerail]

I would say that FL Republicans are sticking their heads in the sand, but around here digging a hole in the sand and sticking your head in it might accidentally give you some indication that sea levels are rising.

[Donerail]

Had FL Dems fielded a great candidate in 2014, Rick Scott would have been irrelevant by now.

We're always taking suggestions. Also, those other Republicans you're referring to (Atwater & Putnam) are both well-liked incumbents facing random opponents - guys I hadn't heard of before 2014.

I would say that FL Republicans are sticking their heads in the sand, but around here digging a hole in the sand and sticking your head in it might accidentally give you some indication that sea levels are rising.

It isn't just Republicans.  And they aren't so much sticking their heads in the sand as trying to squeeze out every last construction and tourism dollar.  A five-foot sea level rise will affect about 99 thousand homes in Miami, worth about 32 billion dollars collectively.  Similar statistics exist for Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, etc.  Key West will no longer be accessible by road, unless Floridians want to spend a hundred billion dollars raising the highway that leads to it, because it will be mostly submerged one day, and Key West itself will probably be a very small, uninhabitable, treeless sandbar in any event.  Amazingly, the pace of development isn't slowing.  Construction on a one-billion dollar shopping mall in Broward County is ongoing even as I type this.  In Miami, a 750 million-dollar convention center is being built, along with an 1800-room hotel, all of which will be under water in less than one hundred years, even if conservative estimates of sea-level rise are correct.

Start talking about climate change and that money starts to dry up.  Legislators who get blamed for putting millions of construction workers and tourism-industry workers out of work are legislators who will soon be out of work themselves, wouldn't you imagine?

Yes, I'm well aware - that category includes my house. Dems at least talk the better game on climate change, and they do vote the better game too. Dems have been in the minority since 1996, so I don't really know how much they can be trusted to keep their promises on that - but regardless, the guys in power now are producing stories like the one in the OP, so things certainly can't get worse in terms of preparing for climate change.

[Donerail]

Once we get back into a -AMO regime you'll see a recover in Atlantic side Arctic ice like the PDO did with the bering straight. Antarctic ice had another runaway year and positive feedback loops will begin to reinforce thickness down there as well.

... except AMO has already been factored into global surface temperature trends and it can't explain by itself the changes we're seeing. The magnitude of current warming matches best to greenhouse gases. Antarctica, since you bring it up, is gaining sea ice but losing land ice. Sea ice growth is a temporary reaction to a loss of land ice, the latter of which is a better indicator of climate change (runoff from melting land ice adds more fresh water to the ocean, creating a more stable and less dense layer of water in which sea ice can more easily form).

[Donerail]

Florida is going to be so screwed by climate change. The highest point in the entire state is 345 feet. There are places in California not even 345 feet horizontally from the ocean higher than that. Marin headlands near the Golden Gate is one such place.

Yeah cuz no country has ever figured out how to house millions below sea level despite the threat of powerful storms with 100mph winds that can last for days, creating immense tidal surges...before the advent of modern technology...nah, that's never happened. 

For the construction necessary for that to happen, you'd have to have some realization on the part of state government that such steps are necessary. This entire thread is about how that's not happening.