Climate Change: The Gorilla arrives on a rising tide

Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a piece titled Frankenstorms and Gorillas:

Denialism’s job is to convince the public that there is too much doubt to justify action, that the science itself is corrupted, that it’s all a plot to transfer wealth, that it’s part of the political and culture wars.  And it’s worked.
The problem is that extreme weather events and trends (droughts, floods, ice melts ) are consistent with the predictions of climate change and generate unease in the population.  The denialist’s job is then to  persuade the public to ignore that which, if immediate and local, is increasingly difficult to ignore.
It’s rather like living with a large gorilla.  So long as it remains passive, even as it grows, we can live with it.  But when it stomps around and upsets the furniture, and looks to be getting ever more hungry, then advice to ignore it is futile.  The denialists must either make the gorilla go away or acknowledge its presence.
So long as there are extreme weather events, the onus of proof is not on the science; it’s on the denialists.  The latter must explain why such events don’t matter (i.e. ignore the gorilla), provide assurance that they won’t get worse (i.e. ignore the gorilla’s appetite) or accept that we have a gorilla problem.

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What I didn’t predict then was that denialism’s vulnerability was not the big, violent event (the gorilla), but the one that seeps in from below:

As she planned her run for the Florida House of Representatives this year, Kristin Jacobs told her team that she wanted her campaign to address the effects of climate change.  … few issues were more critical to residents of southeast Florida than street flooding at high tide — even on some sunny days — and ocean water seeping into their drinking water.

Voters have answered yes so far, handing Krtistin Jacobs a victory in the Democratic primary in August with more than 76 percent of the vote. Opinion polls suggest she will cruise to victory in November.

The results were “shocking,” said Steven J. Vancore, a pollster and political consultant advising Ms. Jacobs. …

 … in communities across the country where the effects are lapping at the doorsteps of residents, pragmatism often trumps politics, and candidates as well as elected officials across the political spectrum are embracing the issue.

Some local Republican officials in Florida and elsewhere say they can no longer follow the lead of state and national party leaders like Senator Marco Rubio and Gov. Rick Scott, who have publicly questioned whether human activity has had an effect on climate change. (Though both have recently taken a more vague, “I’m not a scientist,” stance.)

… in the Florida Keys, George Neugent, a Republican county commissioner, said that while people may disagree about what to do about climate change, the effects of flooding and hurricanes are less ambiguous. “Clearly rising tides are going to affect us,” he said.

More here in the New York Times: Pragmatism on Climate Change Trumps Politics at Local Level Across U.S.