Global Climate Change: The Coming Catastrophe

The United States has a very long history of refusing to deal with looming problems until the problems grow to a point where they can no longer be ignored. Naturally this means the resolution of such problems always costs us more money and results in heavier consequences than if we simply admitted the coming problems and dealt with them logically ahead of time in a calm and orderly fashion.

from http://phys.org/news/2011-07-oceans-late-tide.html

The biggest problem is that so far the US has gotten away with this attitude toward dealing with issues, because no issue has yet been so huge as to overwhelm us. But that is about to change over the next century with the looming catastrophe of rising ocean levels due to global climate change.

Take a look at what is happening to Europe right now with the refugees coming out of Syria. Europe is panicking over what is a very small crisis compared to the number of refugees we can expect to see from rising ocean levels over the next century. Magnify the number of refugees to a global level and numbers as much as hundreds of millions and then try to imagine what will likely happen. Folks living inland aren't likely to spread their arms in welcome to help those who knew they lived in the danger areas yet kept stubbornly living there anyhow.

from http://environmental.lilithezine.com/Rising-Sea-Levels.html 

America could do the right thing and actually start working on this problem now. We could create millions of new high-paying jobs for engineers, planners, electricians, carpenters, and so forth by laying out new cities inland and building them, and then offering growing incentives to start moving people away from the danger areas well ahead of time. Will we do that? History says no. History says we will do almost nothing and wait until it blows up into a crisis that may very well take down our country.