Tell me, Dave, did we have hundreds of millions of people living in areas that were flooded in the Paleozoic era when the water levels rose due to melting icecaps?

I live in New Orleans. The streets just flooded here last week. It was crazy. I'm a bit more concerned than you are.

As for a carbon tax, I think it's a brilliant idea if the revenue is given as a dividend to everyone like in Alaska, instead of into government hands. The combo of a steadily rising carbon tax with the revenue distributed as a dividend in the US would increase the incomes of the bottom two-thirds of the population.

Fossil fuels are artificially cheap because the costs are externalized. A carbon tax is not an evil tax. It's a Pigovian tax. Pigovian taxes are designed to be market correcting.

Think of it this way. What if we were neighbors and I ran a business out of my home that put chemicals into the air that made you sick. Who should pay for your medical costs? You or me?

Now imagine your other neighbor was a competitor of mine but had to charge much more for not polluting our air. A pigovian tax recognizes that my costs are unfairly cheap because I'm making other people pay them. It adds a tax to me which puts me and my competitor on equal footing. Now the prices are the same and the better product can win in the market.

One more thing. You can believe anything you want to about temperatures, but keep in mind the rate of change. It's one thing to naturally go from one measurement to another in thousands of years. It's entirely another for the same change to occur in decades.

Basically, we all know from experience that we can grow from being two feet tall to six feet tall, but that's usually over the course of about 15 years. If you were to grow 4 feet in a matter of hours, I guarantee you that you would be a bit concerned, and that there would be some issues you'd experience, including death.