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Sunday, June 29th, 2014

On N.C.’s Outer Banks, Scary Climate-change Predictions Prompt a Change of Forecast

Author:     LORI MONTGOMERY
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     24-Jun-14
 Link: On N.C.’s Outer Banks, Scary Climate-change Predictions Prompt a Change of Forecast
Stephan:   The story of the Outer Banks of North Carolina is the first of what I believe are going to be many sad stories about the effects of climate change on coastal communities. I have spent time on the Outer Banks, have had friends who lived there, and have some sense of what it means to those families, some of whom have been on the Banks for generations. But the the outcome is inevitable because we have failed to respond responsibly for a least a decade to what the data has been telling us. Even now denial dominates. What seems particularly sad is that the other way to look at this is as an extraordinary opportunity to realize a coastal region based on actual ecology, not developer fantasy. An approach which would put tens of thousands to work, and greatly improve the economy. It would also require some state wide or Federal program covering the purchase of condemned properties. Click through for the very useful graphics and video.

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.

Environmentalists […]

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