Everyone, including experts, is just giving their opinion.

Nice try but if it's based on proper science it's not just someone's opinion. Uneducated people tend to dismiss things they don't understand but that's why we call people like that 'stupid'.

"Denialist"...I'll take them over insane statements like that. What does that even mean? Do you just dislike some people so much that making sense gets thrown out the window?

It's not like all those liberals will die in one epic flood lol they will just move to make other places bluer.

Yes, college is not the right place to think about all aspects of everything. We must just follow the script and get in line.

Since you are talking about my question, I'll explain why I asked:

First, the professor had a full day of us just asking him questions about climate change. People ran out of question as most students don't give a damn, they just want to pass.

Second, the professor pretty much said there is very little we can do as one nation so a lot of what we can do is retrofitting and changing the way we currently live here in the US(we consume too much etc. etc.). So it got me thinking...it will hurt places like the US, but what positives could it bring to other places.

My question was entirely academic. In an academic environment, no question or thought should be off the table. For the record, my professor is a good friend of mine. We are working on a paper together. I'm not some "denialist" or whatever else people here brand anyone who doesn't just follow in step 1000% everything that is said to them.

I think Houston is in a unique situation that has little to do with climate change. It’s been flooding here since people moved to the area and I suspect the recent troubles have more to do with heat island effect and impervious cover than they do with man-made climate change.

There is a (very true) saying about Texas, that it’s a “land of ongoing drought punctuated by spectacular floods”. Earlier this summer it didn’t rain in my part of the city for more than 2 months. Last Wednesday, it rained more than 5 inches in less than one hour. If you look at early maps of the area on thing that is notable is the lack of small creeks and tributaries feeding the larger bayous. Given the flat terrain and inconsistent rain patterns, much of the area drained by sheetflowing. Ditches were installed to channel the sheetflow runoff and as the city grew and more impervious surfaces replaced grassland, the ditches filled faster and couldn’t keep up. This is something that the region has been working on fixing for a while now. Tropical systems (which dump rain very quickly) have always stalled over Texas. They run into high pressure over the desert to the west and get stuck until prevailing winds carry them north or east.

Related to a point I made earlier in this thread, climate change could also be speeding up these flooding events, even though they would eventually happen under "normal" conditions.

Yes, this is true.

So, the statement "97% of climate scientists believe that the earth is warming" is really 97% of scientists hold the opinion that the earth is warming due to human activity. I'd like to see some of them explain why they feel that way, so that I can make my opinion better.

Literally nobody said this.

Besides, have you even thought about this concept? Do you think flooded cities would end liberal politics? Lol.

You're inventing stuff that I never talked about. There is no solution to warming. It's all about redirecting money. That's all it's always been about.

The Earth is warming, as it has for the last 18,000 years. Nobody has a solution on how to cool the Earth. Nobody. Nobody has determined at what temperature the Earth should cool to. What is the baseline? Nobody has established this.

Isn't it extremely unfair to have the Earth warm to a certain point, allowing some nations to reap the benefits of a warm world, while leaving other lands too cold to grow crops? When will we have that discussion? Or is that even a discussion to consider? Think about how much land is too damn cold to do anything with on this planet.

Land on Earth is about 29% of the surface, and human settlements are on about 1%.

Most of Canada, Alaska, most of Asia, Nordic nations, all of Antartica, all of Greenland -- it's so damn cold to use the land, live, or grow crops.

Some still think cigarettes don't cause cancer either. (Lots of industry dollars went into the deception, just like this one).

The sum total of scientific knowledge, and near-unanimous conclusions that humans are causing climate change....vs. random people and industry shills. Some opinions aren't like others.

Ciggs and Global Warming. Boy O' Boy, now that's an analogy!

Humans are not causing Climate Change, lol.

Maybe you weren't paying attention 30 years ago. The pattern was similar: Billions of industry dollars one one side, the public health and medical fields on the other. Industry caused confusion, people got suckered, and cigarette regulations were set back by decades. Only later did industry fess up and pay hundreds of billions in penalties for the lies that helped kill millions of people (smokers and the innocent).

Back then, industry stooges called talk radio shows and wrote letters to the paper. Today they spam social media and hang out on bulletin boards. As do the suckers who believe them, or want to believe them.

The difference is that climate change might kill a lot more people. But the lies (and suckers) are the same.

End result: people still smoke because it's still legal, they pay higher taxes though and now marijuana smoking and vaping* is legal. Great analogy.

*Vaping might not be legal in some states now that people have died.

Because climate didn't kill people in the past?

https://i.imgur.com/YZOXtoZ.png

Cigarettes are a simple recreational drug, but energy forms the foundation of modern civilization, and is overwhelmingly provided by carbon fuels. Cut off all oil, coal and natural gas and after the first local winter most of the world's population would be dead.

Absolutely. The scientists who have made their career out of studying the climate are in nearly 100% agreement that the climate is changing rapidly, and humans are causing it.

Its literally completely acceptable to question scientists, in fact it is the duty of the scientific duty to do so.

The notion that there is a "consensus" on any scientific theory is wrong.

(Some) scientists who have made their career out of studying the climate (many) are /in nearly 100%/ (remove for inaccuracy) in agreement that the climate is changing rapidly (delete rapidly) , and humans MAY BE CONTRIBUTING to it.

** there is very little agreement on what should or even can be done about climate change.

I edited it to make it accurate.

Humans are not causing climate change, lol.

There is only so much brain bandwidth available. You may have asked your question in good faith (I have no reason to doubt you), but from the perspective of the professor, your question, which was was essentially "what are the advantages of climate change?" may have set of his/her bad faith argument alarm (i.e. it may have sounded like a young-earth creationist asking a question about the eyes of the coelacanth in a lecture on evolution). If you meant to ask "what groups stand to benefit from climate change" that would be a less loaded way to ask the question since it doesn't have the implied value judgement :).