North Carolina leaders were outraged by climate predictions. So they changed them. [View all]

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Following up on this: NC Environmental Agency Removes Climate Change Info from Website

On N.C.’s Outer Banks, scary climate-change predictions prompt a change of forecast

By Lori Montgomery June 24 at 7:37 PM

NAGS HEAD, N.C. — 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 state had detailed maps to illustrate this claim and was developing a Web site where people could check by street address to see if their property was doomed. There was no talk of salvation, no plan to hold back the tide. 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.

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.

Comments are piling up quickly at the WaPo website.

From the slideshow:



Nags Head, N.C., seen in June, is part of the state's Outer Banks region, which has become a flashpoint in the debate over global warning. In 2010, the science panel of the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission concluded that sea levels along the coast could rise anywhere from 15 to 55 inches over the coming century. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)