This is a third post on newspaper stories that I recently read. Today's post deals with science, politics, and rising sea levels. Incidentally, the title is a blatant reference to John Allen Paulos's brilliant book, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper.

The NC legislature approved a measure that promotes development along the NC coast. The legislation addresses a 2010 report prepared by the NC Coastal Resources Commission’s Science Panel on Coastal Hazards that reviewed the scientific literature and gave several projections for sea level rise by 2100. (See p. 10-12 and Fig. 2 of the NCCRC report.) The report states: "Given the range of possible rise scenarios and their associated levels of plausibility, the Science Panel recommends that a rise of 1 meter (39 inches) be adopted as the amount of anticipated rise by 2100, for policy development and planning purposes." (NCCRC, p. 12)

Some representatives in the state legislature felt that preparing for a 1 meter rise in sea levels would hurt development. The newspaper article says "The bill’s main backer, ... said the more severe prediction of sea-level rise would sink property values, hurt tax revenues and inflate insurance rates." Therefore, the legislature decreed that models that predict an acceleration of sea-level rise should not be used. This, in effect, results in NC planners using the lower bound from the 2010 NCCRC report, which is "the amount of rise that will occur given a linear projection with zero acceleration." (NCCRC, p. 10)

The exact wording of the bill that passed is available online. See Paragraph (c) on page 2.

Has the NC legislature "rejected the science" in the NCCRC report, as some have claimed? Or is it the responsibility of an elected official to adopt the portions of the NCCRC report that are least onerous to his present constituents? Given that the officials will all be dead in 2100, what responsibility does an elected official have to citizens that are not yet born?

Comments?