Time and the Tides Will Tell

 "Flooding has not increased over the past century, nor have landfalling hurricanes. Remarkably, the U.S. is currently experiencing the longest-ever recorded period with no strikes of a Category 3 or stronger hurricane.
"Over the past six decades, tornado damage has declined after accounting for development that has put more property into harm's way."
Professor Robert Pielke Jr., disaster and climate change expert, University of Colorado-Boulder

Some of that property damage attributable to greater population numbers settling in areas that are prone to, susceptible to, vulnerable to climate-related catastrophes. If housing were not placed in areas that are clearly in line to be severely affected when adverse atmospheric conditions do materialize, the damage would be limited.

But populations have a tendency to grow, and municipal authorities have a tendency to shrug off the likelihood of 'rare' weather events.

Arctic ice has regrown itself, and temperatures which not so long ago appeared to be cautioning science that those great Arctic swells of sea ice would soon disappear and leave vast swaths of navigable areas where before there were none, to hasten commerce and sea traffic, may be just wishful thinking. The Danish Meteorological Institute, tracking Arctic temperatures since 1958 has verified that turn-around.

In fact at the other end - which is to say both polar ice caps, sea ice which had been diminishing in Antarctica has presented itself more latterly as above average. Global sea ice now exceeds the average that satellite measurements made possible since 1979. The global warming phenomenon appears to have halted. In fact, it seemed to plateau in the late 1990s.

And now it appears that NASA's Jim Hansen, and the IPCC's Rajendra Pachauri will admit to the standstill in temperatures.

Furthermore, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year was in agreement; long-term climate change cannot be held responsible for extreme event damage. Typhoons in China, bushfires in Australia, windstorms in Europe do represent extreme weather events, destructive in their aftereffects, but extreme weather events have always occurred, as anomalies of natural events.

The National Opinion Research Center at University of Chicago has released a study: Public Attitudes towards Climate Change & Other Environmental Issues across Time and Countries, 1992- 2010, revealing that most people in the 33 countries whose attitudes toward global warming were noted by the ISSP, were fairly unconcerned about global warming, putting it well down on their list of concerning issues.

The most concerned country was Norway, where 4% of the population cited global warming as an issue of grave concern to them. Next up, surprisingly enough was Canada, where the concerned figure came in at 3%. Fewer than 1% of people in Great Britain expressed concern over global warming as an issue that troubles them greatly. 

Less than one-half of 1% of Americans felt concerned enough about global warming as an issue to identify it as an threat to the future to trouble them unduly.

Those who consider themselves committed environmentalists and who cleave to the belief of global warming's inevitability, and carbon dioxide increases related to human activities being responsible for that inevitability, remain convinced.

They campaign passionately about what they consider to be the single most important issue facing a troubled world. To them, the issue is clear and it is compelling and it represents a dire threat.