Tidalgate

The pop-opinion realm of denial, doing the "yada yada" around the blogosphere, operates as if the climate change (caused by global warming, caused by pollution) is merely a fanciful academic exercise.

That is, in their imagination there is no real world where climate science applies to real life in any concrete way.

Therefore, it would follow that they would surmise that the discussions going on in San Francisco are play pretend, not officially serious as a heart attack.

One report has gone into minute detail to show just how much climate change, in the form of rising oceans, will impact civilization:

Although we must do everything in our power to slow down climate change, it is too late to prevent it entirely. All levels of government, and especially local governments, must begin preparing for and building resilience to the effects of climate change, an area of planning known as climate change adaptation.

In this SPUR report, we survey the likely impacts of climate change in the San Francisco Bay Area, including extreme weather, sea level rise and more.

We recommend more than 30 strategies for local and regional agencies to begin minimizing the region’s vulnerabilities to these long-term but potentially catastrophic effects.

(Climate Change Hits Home, emphasis added). That is serious talk which points out that we have gone too far now to stop the climate change, to stop catastrophic sea rise, or to stop its impact on international shipping.

So, the thing to do is get busy, roll up the shirt sleeves, and become expert at this new discipline called "climate change adaptation", which does not include climate change denial:

Adaptation must happen locally. Adaptation is often implemented locally because the impacts of climate change are geographically variable, and vulnerabilities to these impacts are more variable still. Because of the local knowledge necessary to understand risks and reduce vulnerabilities, we must plan adaptation actions fairly close to home. The process of adaptation planning identifies a set of actions to decrease a system’s vulnerability, or increase its resilience, to the impacts of climate change. It can be planned — the essence of this paper — or ad hoc, the latter most likely to occur after an extreme event or disaster.

(ibid, page 5). The truth of the posts All Ecological Disasters Are Local, All Ocean Experience Is Local, and All Weather is Local is coming home to roost.

One technical aspect of the San Francisco plan is a large tidal dam, so Dredd Blog sees a way to use that not only for surge protection, but it can also generate a very valuable supply of clean energy if they include tidal generators in the plan.

When locals around the world stake their future on their climate change denial illusion, they will pay the price locally.

By the same token, when locals take action to adapt to the inevitable, they will reap the rewards locally.