The "king tides" are upon us for this month. Luckily, there are no weather systems with sufficient wind to move a 15-foot tide over the various barriers and into our beach communities. We will see what happens in the coming winter.
As widely reported, this year will see a very active El Nino, which could produce higher than normal storm activity generated from the Pacific Ocean. There are lots of people out there who believe that increased storm activity - typhoons and hurricanes - are the result of manmade global warming. Although there is no evidence that suggests this correlation is real, the perceived relationship is enough to fuel political agendas that are ongoing and that have, over the years, culminated in various climate change summits.
The Kyoto Accord may have been a good idea but it, the disastrous Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference of six years ago and all of the other attempts to rally countries to save the world have not come close to making headway.
The problem is that developing countries want to focus on developing and not on spending billions of dollars to curb emissions when they need to spend billions on providing food, electricity and water for hundreds of millions of impoverished citizens.
In 2007, Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize winner, former U.S. vice president, author, soothsayer and hypocrite extraordinaire, announced the "North Polar Ice Cap is falling off a cliff." He went on to say that "it could be completely gone in as little as seven years".
This is when you would see pictures of polar bears balancing on pieces of stray ice all over the place. Well, 2014 has come and gone and now the Northern Polar Ice Cap is larger than it has been in 35 years and it is only getting bigger and thicker.
So, with all the failures and all of the good and bad will gained and lost in these seemingly pointless summits, what can we expect from the Paris United Nations Climate Change Conference that begins Monday?
All the urgency and "tipping point" banter aside, I am guessing there will again be no binding commitment to any worldwide agreement.
U.S. President Barack Obama will attempt to rein in China and India but I suspect neither of these countries will ever be told what to do. Instead, vague promises to convoluted emissions compensation equations will be the order of the day and it will be business as usual.
Global warming is an enigma. Last year a Gallop poll in the United States showed there are three main groups that have an opinion on global warming and its causes. There are the "concerned believers" at 39 per cent, the "mixed middle" at 36 per cent and the "cool skeptics" that account for one in four citizens. This last group is the fastest growing at the expense of the mixed middle and do not believe in man-made global warming.
Bjorn Lomborg from the Copenhagen Consensus Centre recently published a report in the journal Global Policy that proclaims, "Even if every government on the planet not only keeps every Paris promise, reduces all emissions by 2030, and shifts no emissions to other countries, but also keeps these emission reductions throughout the rest of the century, temperatures will be reduced by just 0.17°C (0.3°F) by the year 2100."
Hardly impressive or meaningful. The money can go elsewhere. Mike Schneider is founder of Project Pickle and likes to write about growing, cooking and eating food.
