I've been wondering when the benefits and costs of sea level rise regulations in North Carolina might be assessed as required by the state legislature (emphasis added):
Frank Gorham III, chairman of the state Coastal Resources Commission, is winning support for his mission to chill the scorching issues around climate change and rising sea levels on the North Carolina coast.
Coastal developers and Republican legislators were alarmed when a state science panel warned in 2010 that the Atlantic Ocean might climb 39 inches higher along our shores by the end of this century. In 2012, the legislature ordered a four-year moratorium on sea-level predictions and gave the Coastal Resources Commission strict guidelines for developing a new official state forecast.
Gorham declared in May that the next report will look only 30 years into the future – a relatively short time span when there is expected to be little disagreement over what will happen along the coast.
And now that Gorham has rolled back the scope of its work, he says the original science panel can do the job without help from new members who might inject bias and controversy into the process. ...
Although the science panel will produce its draft forecast by the end of 2014, there will be more months of review and deliberation before the Coastal Resources Commission formally delivers a report to the legislature in 2016.
Gorham, appointed to the commission by Gov. Pat McCrory, lives at Figure Eight Island and makes his living drilling for petroleum in the Southwest. He said the panel’s work will be circulated for public comment and critiqued by a pair of scientists known nationally for their sea-level research: Robert G. Dean, a former civil engineering professor at the University of Florida, and James R. Houston, a former research director with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Once the 30-year forecast has been formulated, Gorham will order a second report requested by the General Assembly: a study of the economic and environmental costs and benefits of developing coastal regulations based on the sea-level forecast.
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