BANNED - Sea Level Rise

"Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings. For there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven, earth and sea obey."

Does everyone know the legend of Canute the Great, Viking king of Denmark, England, and Norway around 1000 AD? The man who, in an attempt to dispel the myth that he was all-powerful (as well as showing piety), placed his throne on the shore and ordered the sea level to not rise up to him (BBC 2011). When it ignored his order, as he had wanted, his point was made and others could see the limitations of humans.

Beach protection at Outer Banks, North Carolina - Source: CoastalCare.org

Why then do some lawmakers in several American states believe that they can tell the oceans to stop rising? Do they feel, as Canute did, that they are receiving too much praise and flattery? Or do they simply believe that they can control the oceans?

Seemingly a wave of sea level denial has spread across the American South. If your state is at risk of sea level rise you might want to avoid what legislators and state officials in Texas, Virginia, and North Carolina have proposed.

Efforts to legislate away the threat and reality of sea level rise began in Texas last year. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality commissioned a scientific study of a section of Texas’ coastline. The problem was that the Commission didn’t approve of references to sea level rise and so had them removed from the report (Grimm 2012). Incredibly, author of the study John Anderson, who has like his fellow authors asked to have his name removed from the paper, said that “they actually omitted whole sentences that mentioned sea level rise.”

Similarly, in June a study looking at the effects of climate change on Virginia’s coastline was only approved by its General Assembly after references to ‘sea level rise’ and ‘climate change’ had been removed from the $50,000 report (Leber 2012). Instead, it used approved terms such as ‘recurrent flooding’. What reason could be given for this? Well, the one given by the Republican State Delegate Chris Stolle is that the omitted terms would simply politicise the report as ‘sea level rise is a left-wing term”.

It is not the case that Virginia has escaped the impact of rising sea levels though. Norfolk, Virginia spends around $6 million/year improving drainage as well as elevating housing and roads (BBC 2012). Additionally, during storms 5-10% of the city receives heavy flooding. Responses to these problems, and repair of the naval base, surprisingly make no mention of climate change or sea level rise.

Seb Hall, a follower of the blog, recently brought the video clip below to my attention. The news report takes a comedic slant to discuss the attempts by east coast legislators to ban the phrase ‘sea level rise’ and by doing so in my opinion, highlight how ludicrous the measures seem to be.

                              

North Carolina is also mentioned and there is good reason for this. In June, policy makers that didn’t like the impact that predictions of a 1 metre rise in sea level would have on the state’s business interests wrote a law to control how it is measured. The bill says that:

“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 seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly. …”

You may find it amusing to read Scott Huler’s blog in which he rants about these measures. I have picked out one of my favourite sections for you to read:

“North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises.

Which, yes, is exactly like saying, do not predict tomorrow’s weather based on radar images of a hurricane swirling offshore, moving west towards us with 60-mph winds and ten inches of rain. Predict the weather based on the last two weeks of fair weather with gentle breezes towards the east. Don’t use radar and barometers; use the Farmer’s Almanac and what grandpa remembers.”

Thankfully, a week after passing through the North Carolina Senate international public criticism of the law saw it get shot down unanimously in its House of Representatives (Philips 2012). This is lucky as the in the same month, sea level in the region was reported to have accelerated by 2-3.7 mm/year meaning that changes there are 3-4 times the global average (Sallenger et al. 2012). Thus, the 1 metre predictions which North Carolina was so against may instead be 20-29 cm larger by 2100.

References

BBC (2011) ‘Is King Canute misunderstood?’ (WWW), London: BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13524677; 28 November 2012).

BBC (2012) ‘Virginia's dying marshes and climate change denial’ (WWW), London: BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17915958; 29 November 2012).

Grimm, F. (2012) ‘Commentary: add rising sea levels to the list of banned terms’ (WWW), Miami: The Miami Herald
(http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/06/17/152200/commentary-add-rising-sea-levels.html; 29 November 2012).

Huler, S. (2012) ‘NC considers making sea level rise illegal’ (WWW), Scientific American (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2012/05/30/nc-makes-sea-level-rise-illegal; 26 November 2012).

Leber, R. (2012) ‘Virginia lawmaker says ‘sea level rise’ is a ‘left wing term’, excises it from state report on coastal flooding’ (WWW), ThinkProgress
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/10/496982/virginia-lawmaker-says-sea-level-rise-is-a-left-wing-term-excises-it-from-state-report-on-coastal-flooding; 30 November 2012).

Phillips, L. (2012) ‘Sea versus senators’, Nature, 486, 7404, 450.

Sallenger, A. H., K. S. Doran and P. A. Howd (2012) ‘Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America’, Nature Climate Change, 2, 884–888.