SO I GUESS I NEED TO BUY SOME WELLIES: The Miami Herald has an editorial, “The End of Florida?,” which echoes the Al Gore/Barack Obama doom and gloom predictions about global warming climate change:

But as bad as hurricanes are, they do not pose existential threats to Florida, or to our future. The recurring peril of windstorms has certainly not stopped the influx of millions of new residents that began in the post-war years and has turned Florida into the third most populous state in the union.

But climate change — specifically, sea-level rise caused by global warming — poses a challenge of another order of magnitude. A hurricane hits our shores like a big bang. It’s here and then gone, leaving disaster in its wake. We clean up, we move on.

Sea-level rise is something else: an insidious attack, slowly gnawing away at our beaches, our coastline, our coastal cities. It doesn’t go away.

And it’s here already. Look at the flooded streets in Miami Beach. Or, further up the coast, the 450-year-old city of St. Augustine, whose streets already flood about 10 times a year, and homes built on sand dunes teetering over open space as the Atlantic encroaches on the foundations. All of Florida’s coastal cities face similar threats. Over on the Gulf side, the Tampa/St. Pete area is deemed particularly vulnerable to rising seas because roads and bridges weren’t designed to handle higher tides. . . .

These are not wild guesses or alarmist warnings. They’re predictions, based on accepted science. . . . We don’t think the end of Florida is inevitable, or even likely. But the end of Florida as we know it is certainly possible, and growing more likely every year as the state’s once limitless future erodes along with the vanishing beaches and shrinking shoreline.

Um, the flooding of streets in Miami recently was caused by heavy, slow-moving thunderstorms, not global warming climate change. And St. Augustine has always flooded because 90% of the city is located in an historic floodplain and the development of barrier islands has reduced the ability of the land to absorb the brunt of storms entering from the Atlantic side.  It has nothing to do with global warming climate change.

I live in Key Largo– one of the most “vulnerable” little islands in the Florida Keys. I have lived here for many years, and I can tell you that I haven’t noticed even the slightest change in sea levels. The tide comes in; the tide goes out. Sometimes the tide rises higher and our street floods near our boat basin. Other days it doesn’t. It ebbs and flows, as tides do. Rainy season comes and goes. When it rains a lot, we have some minor flooding. When it doesn’t, we don’t. Yes, the climate changes–every single day, minute by minute. But this isn’t a reason to fundamentally transform the energy sector, taxation policy or the global economy.

These scaremongering tactics are just that. And it’s far from “accepted science” that global warming climate change is an “existential threat” to Florida, or anywhere else.