Climate change isn't the only thing that increases the probability. Over the long term they may eventually be the largest cause, but currently I would cite many, many other issues.
Sea walls, land use changes, water pumping, loss of wetlands all affect the severity of tides. All these things could be changed to avoid issues while completely ignoring climate change for now.... Yet they do nothing. Ocean bathymetry is extremely complex, messing with one thing on a shoreline effects everything around it. Just yelling "It's all climate change" is both stupid and dangerous. Trying to stop the shoreline from moving is stupid, expensive, and in the long term, dangerous.
Sure thing, all the other states you mention speak to the capacity of the shoreline to absorb some amount of water increase (from any source). Independently, if the frequency and intensity of flooding events is predicted to increase in the future, one would think that long term zoning regulations to preserve or increase the capacity of the shore to absorb flooding would be cheaper than, fix-it-quick with big infrastructure projects after catastrophic damage has already occured. That's why it's cheaper to address it now, rather than wait until the building policy completely breaks down.
The clear consensus is that AGW is real. That is a far cry from saying that there is a clear consensus that it must be dealt with ever, let alone that it must be dealt with in the near-term.
There's no consensus that it "must" be dealt with, however, there is a clear consensus that if we don't deal with it (which is a quite possible scenario) then places like Florida Keys will cease to be inhabitable within the next 50-100 years.
> There's no consensus that it "must" be dealt with
If you mean that there is no political consensus in the United States, yes, that's true beyond a doubt.
If you mean that there is no consensus among scientists and experts in the field, then that's wrong. There is and has been a clear consensus that we "must" act urgently.
Scientists have a clear consensus that if we don't do it, then we'll have certain consequences.
However, if we're looking at the actions of everyone who might actually deal with it, then there's a clear consensus that we're actually choosing to face the consequences instead.
"Must" implies a degree of certainty, a statement that we will have to deal with it one way or another, and thus we will deal with it - however, that doesn't seem to be the case here, it is quite plausible that we will choose to not deal with it properly. It would be nice if we acted urgently, but there's no "must" there - it's quite likely that we will not do so.
If we want to use the word "must" then it might be more appropriate to say that irreversible climate change is the thing that must occur, given the current global political 'climate'.
I generally agree, and don't want to bicker over the wording, except one important point ...
> if we're looking at the actions of everyone who might actually deal with it, then there's a clear consensus that we're actually choosing to face the consequences instead.
Very many are denying that climate change is happening, or falling back to denying the consequences, or falling back to saying there's nothing we can do about it.
At least from the political perspective, I feel that most of it is simply justification and rationalization.
After you've made a decision that for your country/company/party/economic group/whatever the desired course of action is to not work against climate change, then you still have to communicate and "sell" that decision to everyone else, and denying the consequences or saying that we can't do anything has much less backlash than openly saying "fuck you, got mine".
While it's also true that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!", I believe that most of the involved politicians understand the future consequences (at least the mid-term consequences to their particular area) quite well, but politic communication is about telling whatever will get your goals achieved the best, not about communicating your personal beliefs truthfully.
It's the same thing with jobs - can you imagine any politician telling to a distressed area/industry "no, your jobs are never going to come back" even if that's an obvious truth?
Sea walls, land use changes, water pumping, loss of wetlands all affect the severity of tides. All these things could be changed to avoid issues while completely ignoring climate change for now.... Yet they do nothing. Ocean bathymetry is extremely complex, messing with one thing on a shoreline effects everything around it. Just yelling "It's all climate change" is both stupid and dangerous. Trying to stop the shoreline from moving is stupid, expensive, and in the long term, dangerous.