Widely reported, but in case you missed it, the NC state senate doesn’t like scary predictions… so it just outlaws them:

Senate committee likes the slow-rise approach for sea-level forecasts

Rejecting a science panel’s warning that the North Carolina coast should prepare for an increasingly rapid rise in sea level later in this century, a Senate committee on Thursday endorsed far-reaching rules that would force planning and regulatory agencies to base sea-level forecasts only on the slower rates recorded in the past.

“If you’re going to use science when you really can’t validate it, … you’re going to be implementing policy and rules and regulations that can have a very, very negative impact on the coastal economy of this state,” said Sen. David Rouzer, a Benson Republican who championed the legislation.

The bill would give the state Coastal Resources Commission sole responsibility for making any prediction for the rate of sea-level rise to be used as the basis for state or local regulations. The commission is a planning board with 15 members appointed by the governor.

It would place tight restrictions on how the commission could develop its forecast.

Projections for future rates must be based on “statistically significant, peer-reviewed historical data,” the bill says. The forecast could not include any prediction that sea level would rise at a faster rate in future years – unless this accelerated pace is “consistent with historic trends.”

That acceleration is just what has been predicted by several national scientific societies and other scientists, including a panel the Coastal Resources Commission appointed to make a forecast for the North Carolina coast. The panel said in 2010 that a rise of one meter (39 inches) was likely by 2100, partly because the rate of that increase will speed up by the middle of the century.

“It’s already clear from the data that the rates of sea-level rise are accelerating,” professor Rob Jackson, who heads the Duke University Center on Global Change, told committee members. “We know that, and we know why: because of increasing temperatures and thermal expansion of ocean water, and because of ice melting.”

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