Wow, it's hard to imagine an article more disconnected from reality. If Ms. Harvey had bothered to read the law in question, she'd have seen that it doesn't even slightly resemble her description of it. It actually just requires a balanced, scientific analysis, rather than another political manifesto masquerading as a scientific assessment of the sort which has apparently so confused Ms. Harvey. Here's a brief history of the law:

In 2010 the NC DCM's Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) Science Panel on Coastal Hazards produced a severely-flawed "Assessment Report" projecting wildly accelerated sea-level rise, to justify potentially ruinous regulatory changes for NC's coastal communities. That Report prompted critiques from physicist John Droz (part 1 and part 2), sealevel.info webmaster Dave Burton (here) (that's me, BTW), and others. I also discussed the Report in this lecture at the John Locke Foundation.

In April 2012, the CRC Science Panel issued an Addendum to their 2010 Report, defending the Report's conclusions even while abandoning its key claim that the rate of sea-level rise has accelerated. Six of the Report's authors also issued a separate defense of the Report, which doubled down on its errors. The NC General Assembly then enacted a new law, HB-819, by lopsided bipartisan margins, requiring further study of the issue before imposing regulations. HB-819 was harshly criticized by Climate Movement activists like Duke University's Bill Chameides, who claimed that it was a bill to "mandate how much sea level will rise," and said that it legislates "how much sea level rise is lawfully allowable." Those false accusations prompted this rebuttal from sealevel.info webmaster Burton.

Physicist John Droz has also compiled a very useful Timeline/History of the kerfuffle over sea-level rise in North Carolina.

I'm disappointed that a science reporter like Ms. Harvey is apparently unaware of the fact that overwhelming measured evidence indicates that anthropogenic GHGs are not causing accelerated sea-level rise. Mankind has been driving up GHG levels dramatically for 2/3 century, from barely over 300 ppmv to approximately 400 ppmv, yet there's been no acceleration at all in SLR in that time, as you can plainly see from the sea-level measurements at long-term tide gauges like these:

What's more, the physics of greenhouse warming means that additional CO2 has a logarithmically diminishing effect on warming. The NCAR radiation code says just 40 ppmv of CO2 would produce fully half the warming of the current 400 ppmv. MODTRAN Tropical Atmosphere says just 20 ppmv CO2 would do it. Either way, we're well into the area of diminishing returns w/r/t warming from CO2.

That means the next 100 ppmv of CO2 will have even less effect than the last 100 ppmv, and we'll probably have less than 80 ppmv added in the next 30 years (the scope of the upcoming Report).

I'm an IPCC AR5 WGI (“The Physical Science Basis”) Expert Reviewer, and I'm here to tell you that the IPCC's acceleration scenarios are not credible. They're ideologically driven, not evidence driven -- just like an awful lot of the so-called "science reporting" in the Press.

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