Not a bad move on your part. The rapid population growth definitely has an impact. I wish both sides would talk about this and other variables that actually matter.
Middle America has always, and always will be, less vulnerable to severe weather and changes. It made it a great place to settle down. People moved to more vulnerable places and live the same way. There are things for all of us to learn.
Every workday every summer for 22 years in Alabama I drove through downtown of a medium-sized city and within 4 miles was driving through farm fields, I casually noted temperature drops as high a 8 degrees heading out of town. More common was 3-5 degrees.
I have a summer place in remote NE Minnesota. The record high at the nearest long-operating station, about 40 miles away was 1901, 105F. The record for cold, -60F is from 1996. It's in Superior National Forest so wildfires are a thing. 9 of the 10 largest fires here occurred prior to 1919.
The biggest problem is we only have a couple hundred years of data at best. There is evidence in the paleo record that a pattern of recurring multi-decade droughts, some as long as 70-90 years, have occurred in the Western US, for example.
Here in the Midwest people try to count tornadoes and floods and snowfall to convince us to eat bugs and ditch our racist single-family homes. (I never considered the upper Midwest an area less vulnerable to severe weather than others.
Stats of weather can be cherry-picked all day to make any argument a person wants.
I think the effects of atmospheric carbon are at worst a very distant threat to humanity. Our industrial farming practices are probably the most clear and present danger (I realize that's a fringe position, but I'll own it). We're steadily sterilizing the soil. The most activist thing thing I've probably done is to buy regeneratively-raised meat and produce every chance I get. Can't quite get to 100%, but get a little closer every year. Expensive though.
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