How sea level rules would hinder N.C.’s coast

The recent committee approval of House Bill 819 in the state Senate was, as expected, widely criticized by sea level rise “believers.” Members of NC 20, who are labeled “deniers,” are routinely accused of not understanding science and for requesting legislative intervention based purely on economics. Let’s take a look at those accusations.

First, note that fears of global warming and accelerated sea level rise are reminiscent of previous climate change concerns, only in reverse. Newsweek magazine, in the April 28, 1975, edition, in an article entitled “The Cooling World,” warned of “drastic decline in food production” and opined that “resulting famines would be catastrophic” due to global cooling. Foremost among the scientists predicting this doomsday scenario were those from NOAA, the very agency now part of the current doomsday scenario of global warming, massive ice melt and a “hockey stick” sea level rise. If the climate change community was totally wrong 37 years ago, shouldn’t we be a little bit leery of their prediction today of a massive sea level rise 88 years hence?

Second, despite warnings of an accelerating sea level rise, Dr. Robert Dean, professor emeritus at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and his co-author, Dr. James Houston, director emeritus of the Engineer Research and Development Center, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, concluded in a recent paper (which Dean summarized in a recent presentation to NC 20): “The results of all of our analyses are consistent – there is no indication of an overall world-wide sea level acceleration in the 20th Century data. Rather, it appears that a weak deceleration was present.”

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