Sandbags lie in disarray along North Topsail Beach
Credit: John Althouse AP

This summer, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives tacked onto a military funding bill a provision that prohibits the use of federal funds by the military to study global climate change or even to plan how to respond to it. (emphasis added)

U.S. Rep. Ken Buck from Colorado called the military concern with global climate change a radical climate change agenda.

It is surprising that a major political party in this age of enlightenment has a central “plank” in its party doctrine showing skepticism about global climate change. Commonly, the skepticism includes the assumption that humans bear no responsibility for the sea-level and climate changes occurring. It is an example of what columnist Leonard Pitts called “the alternative reality of conservative orthodoxy.”

No better example exists of an immediate military requirement than the need to raise the Navy’s docks and piers to accommodate the rising sea. Recently four of the piers at the […]