North Carolina GOP Seeks to Ignore Climate Change

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse BEFORE it was moved 1800 feet to save it from erosion and rising sea levels

In yet another example of today's Republican Party is the party of ignorance and backward thinking, Republicans in the North Carolina legislature are pushing a bill that would have that state ignore the realities of climate change and rising sea levels even though the state's Outer Banks region and areas on Pamlico Sound is constantly beset with a battle against the rising ocean levels.  The GOP simply wants to pretend the problem doesn't exist.  Just like they want gays to cease to exist.  Fear of change - especially changing demographics - seems to trump any and every logical approach to a changing objective reality.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at this head in the sand approach.  Here are highlights:

Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are circulating a bill which would limit their state agencies’ ability to calculate sea-rise levels, a proposal that one member of the state’s Coastal Resources Commission science panel has termed “bad science.”

The bill has not yet been introduced, but the language in the version being circulated would make the Division of Coastal Management the only state agency allowed to produce sea-level rise rates, and only at the request of the Coastal Resources Commission, and then only under the following conditions:

These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.

In other words, instead of taking into account global warming to predict higher seas, as expected by most scientists, the bill would have the state rely only on the historical record. 

Rob Young, a geology professor at Western Carolina University and a member of the CRC’s science panel, told the North Carolina Coastal Federation (NCCF), an environmental advocacy group, that the bill runs counter to the findings of the National Academy of Sciences and “every major science organization on the globe.”  .   .  .   .  Young pointed out that other states are planning on a sea-level rise of at least three feet. 

According to the NCCF, the CRC’s science panel drafted a report in 2010 that advised the state to prepare for a sea-level rise of up to 55 inches by 2100. The report said that a 39-inch rise was likely. Those findings were disputed by NC-20, an advocacy group that represents businesses and coastal counties. NCCF reports that, using the standard of the proposed bill, the state would be anticipating a 12-inch rise in sea level by 2100.