In recent days I’ve come to a startling realization. Those of us in California don’t have the luxury of debating whether agw is real. Just three days ago my area experienced a high temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s five degrees hotter than I’ve ever experienced in my life.  I’m not a young man either. Venturing outside was a surreal experience. Words can’t really do justice to that sort of sensory experience.

Next week, and perhaps next year at this time, things might seem more normal. Statistical fluctuations occur in climate effects. That’s normal. The more backward people in the human population take refuge in those fluctuations to deny that climate change is real. The underlying change is the mean temperatures around which those fluctuations in temperature occur. That mean temperature is rising. As much as that is a dramatic effect of global warming that isn’t the subject I’m thinking about. What happens when one of the effects of climate change is completely binary? 

I’ve been reading that an ice shelf in Antarctica is being undermined at an alarming rate. If it breaks off the oceans are predicted to rise as much as ten feet. While this would be disastrous many of us are now conditioned emotionally to expect the worst because of effects we’ve already experienced. If an ice shelf breaks off the effects of that will NOT be fluctuations around a rising mean temperature. It will be a completely binary effect of coastline land areas being suddenly and irreversibly underwater. The entire state of Florida would be completely underwater if this worst-case scenario occurred. I wonder what psychological effect this would have on MAGA republicans in that state who are in denial of agw. Even their fearless leader would be underwater – literally.