Climate scientists are lending their computer modeling and data analysis and research findings and learned assumptions to the new governor’s first state hurricane conference this week. Gov. Rick Scott seems fine with that, as long as the brainy guys confine their theories to the short term.
In his short speech opening the conference Wednesday, for example, Scott didn’t object to warnings that Florida is statistically likely to absorb a big hit in 2011. He promised Florida would be ready. “We’re going to be very prepared.”
Scott, however, only accepts climate science devoted to the upcoming hurricane season. When it comes to the long-term stuff – the overwhelming research that warns of man-made global warming – he remains Florida’s denier in chief.
Earlier this month in Copenhagen, 400 climate scientists mulled over new data and issued a warning that the melting of the Arctic ice cap was much more profound than they had previously thought. Among the other consequences, they warned, the world’s sea level will rise faster than earlier projections, least 2 feet 11 inches and perhaps as high as 5 feet 3 inches by 2100.
Such findings might appear to be particularly interesting to the governor of a state with 95 percent of its population clustered within 35 miles of a 1,200-mile coastline. The notion of a hurricane storm surge rolling ashore atop higher seas ought to add another, urgent dimension to a Florida disaster preparedness agenda.
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