The dangers of climate change were revealed to Willo Kelly in a government conference room in the summer of 2011. By the end of the century, state officials said, the ocean would be 39 inches higher and her home on the Outer Banks would be swamped. The 39-inch forecast was a death sentence, Kelly said, for ever trying to sell your house. So Kelly, a lobbyist for Realtors and home builders on the Outer Banks, resolved to prove the forecast wrong. And thus began one of the nation’s most notorious battles over climate change. The state’s new Republican governor appointed a new coastal commission chairman, Frank Gorham, an oil and gas man who announced this spring that the new forecast would be limited to 30 years. With the 100-year forecast, “we just lost credibility,” Gorham said. “If you have a 30-year period, people will take it more seriously.” Rogers, who has served on the commission’s science panel since its inception, predicts that the new forecast will look pretty much like the old one, which concluded that the sea would rise at roughly historic rates through 2050. Only in the latter half of the century is sea-level rise projected to accelerate sharply. But that lies outside the scope of the new forecast, which is due out next year. Coastal residents joined forces with climate skeptics to attack the science of global warming and persuade North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature to deep-six the 39-inch projection, which had been advanced under the outgoing Democratic governor. Now, the state is working on a new forecast that will look only 30 years out and therefore show the seas rising by no more than eight inches.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 23:23:42 +0000
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