Planet Earth Needs You

by Michael Coppola and Nancy Williams Dear Neighbor, You may have seen the many media reports of destructive flooding that has occurred in the Tampa Bay area over the last several years. You may have also seen flooding in your local neighborhood and along the roads as you drove through Pasco County. This is evidence that the effectiveness of our current storm sewer and retention pond system, which is required to be in place on all new developments, is not working to prevent flooding.  Climate change brings greater rainfall over a shorter period of time and often over a much larger area. This more frequent and more severe flooding has been made worse by the poorly planned growth in development that has been going on in Pasco County, Florida, and the surrounding counties. The main focus of the insurance industry is to assess risk, and the risk of flooding is a top priority. They have determined that this risk has increased and will continue to get worse and as a result have expanded ...

  by Michael Coppola and Nancy Williams We are stuck in a world of two battling tribes. One believes in man-made climate change and one that denies it. Even when storms repeatedly destroy a person's home, often that person, if he is a climate denier, will come up with some reason to continue denying the existence of the crisis. They will say such things as, we have always had storms; it's God's will; man is being so arrogant to think he could effect a change in the climate. Are they reacting this way because they have to support their tribe? The other tribe believes that these events are happening because the climate is changing. Human activity has been putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere at a rate that far exceeds anything the planet has seen in the lifetime of humans. They cannot understand why people would deny the evidence and conclusions of climate experts.  The tribe believing in climate change may fail to see that some of the climate deniers have a legitima...