Climate doom is as silly a dogma as climate denial. Hyperbole has poisoned the debate on both fringes, the center is much more reasonable but not as exciting as indignant outrage.
So is all life on the planet going to be destroyed as a result of global warming? No, of course not. Life is far too resilient for that.
Are humans going to wipe themselves out? Doubtful. We're remarkably adaptable animals.
But it's gonna be pretty frickin' miserable for a lot of people, particularly the 40% of people who live within 37 miles of a coastline.
My only point is that even the modest, "non-alarmist" positions are pretty alarming to any reasonable individual. That ain't hyperbole. It's just basic statistics.
Unfortunately it's the case that the extreme hyperbole on both ends drowns out the genuine alarm people should be experiencing at the very realistic effects of a warming climate.
Basically, by recalibrating everyone's expectations to "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE", when you tell them "well, not everyone is gonna die, but a lot of people are gonna get screwed", the response is either "oh, you lied before, I don't believe anything you say now", or "well that doesn't so bad... I'm gonna go rollin' coal."
The projections for warming over the last 15 years have not panned out. There was no rise. So the earliest projections from the alarmists have proven to be wrong.
Are you saying that sea levels in general haven't risen? Or that Florida in particular is somehow immune?
If the former, this[¹] seems to contradict you, are you saying it's wrong, or am I reading it in a different way?
¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#/media/F...
Using that sort of reasoning, it's pretty trivial to show no "warming". But it's nothing more than statistical trickery. When you look at the overall trend, it's pretty clear that global warming has continued apace, right in line with predictions made decades ago. It's actually pretty impressive how closely reality has hewed to those predictions:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/27/climate-c...
In addition, the "flat temperature" argument itself only uses atmospheric temperature and not ocean temperature (which is another huge heat sink). Combined ocean and atmospheric temperatures still show a heat rise, even with the other natural environmental factors pushing a cooldown.
Thanks for playing. You lose: https://www.google.com/search?q=global+warming+prediction+fr...
Your argument was that my argument was a strawman. Those graphs all show projections that have not panned out. To be definitive, either of us would need to locate the original claims from a reliable source.
In case you don't grok the difference, the difference is that a relatively flat decade followed by a huge temperature jump will have the linear regression line for that decade be higher than the actual temperature, because the of the later jump. This is what is (likely) happening now (and what happened in 77-86, and 87-96). The most popular theory as to this seems to be that the heat is stored in the deep ocean, and then releases in a burst into the surface atmosphere.
Which takes me to my second point, that even with your interpretation (which is generally the interpretation of the graphs used to make the 'no warming in 15 years' argument), the graphs being used are surface temperature, and don't include ocean warming. As I mentioned above, including ocean temperatures shows a rise even in static decade temperature, without even involving linear regression.
If you'd like a source, the intended interpretation of the results are all in the IPCC reports, most of which have (reasonably) short summaries. http://www.ipcc.ch/
That said, I will take the word of a consensus of climatologists and meteorologists over that of politicians and religious leaders with a populist agenda, on principle alone.