JOHN SCHWARTZ & RICHARD FAUSSET: Warned of rising seas, N.C. chose to favor development

EDITOR'S NOTE: John Schwartz is a science writer for The New York Times, focusing on climate change. Richard Fausset is a correspondent based in Atlanta. He mainly writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.

As Hurricane Florence blows through and drenches North Carolina, the state may face the consequences of policies minimizing the effect of climate change and allowing extensive development in vulnerable coastal areas.

The storm almost certainly gained destructive power from a warming climate, but a 2012 law, and subsequent actions by the state, effectively ordered state and local agencies that develop coastal policies to ignore scientific models showing an acceleration in the rise of sea levels.

In the years since, the development has continued with little regard to the long-term threat posed by rising sea levels. And the coastal region’s population and economy have boomed, growing by almost half in the last 20 years.

The law, known as HB 819, was widely criticized and even ridiculed when it passed, but it was favored by the state’s business interests, which argued that it was needed to protect property values. Business leaders had been jolted by a state commission’s 2010 report saying that sea levels could rise as much as 39 inches by the year 2100, which would devastate the coast and swamp billions of dollars’ worth of real estate.

Stanley Riggs, a retired research professor at East Carolina University who helped prepare the 2010 report, said that the research could have been used to tackle the difficult problems of development on the state’s delicate coast.

“We were ready to step up to the plate and take a hard look at this long-term problem,” he said. “And we blew it.”

Supporters of the bill, including David Rouzer, a member of the General Assembly at the time, incorrectly argued that the science of climate change and sea level rise could not be validated and their use in forming policy could have “a negative impact on coastal economies.”

A pro-business group, NC-20, which lobbied for the measure, said its goal was to “demand responsible science concerning sea level rise,” but based part of its argument on inaccurate claims that “despite 80 years of man-made carbon dioxide increase, there is no acceleration in sea level rise.”

Opponents, like Deborah K. Ross, a former member of the state Legislature, said that turning a blind eye to the science of climate change was self-destructive.

“In order to protect our people, our property and our environment, we need the most information that we can have, in order to mitigate risk,” she said. “When we ignore facts, we do it at our peril.”

As Hurricane Florence bore down, residents and business owners boarded up homes and businesses up and down the North and South Carolina coasts. Tens of thousands of people headed inland after state and local officials ordered mandatory evacuations of low-lying coastal counties, where the National Hurricane Center predicted a “life-threatening storm surge.”

“We’ve said time and again, we know a lot of our coastal residents have ridden out storms before,” Gov. Roy Cooper said. “This should not be one of those storms.  Don’t risk your life riding out a monster.”

Storm-force winds crawled inland, drenching a wide area with extremely heavy rains. Both the volume and the geographic extent of those rains are are likely 50 percent greater than if there had been no climate change, according to a team of climate scientists led by researchers at Stony Brook University.

The North Carolina state Legislature pushed back against the 2010 sea level warnings even though researchers and universities in the state have been at the forefront of the scientific work that produced them.

Early versions of the 2012 bill even dictated how officials were allowed to forecast sea levels: Only historical data could be used, and not any computer models that showed that the rate of rise would be faster in the future than in the past — an approach that would seriously underestimate the effects of climate change.

The final bill was softened a bit, but another factor helped shift policymaking in the same direction: The election of Pat McCrory as governor in 2012 meant that the Republican Party, which already dominated the Legislature, now had total control of the state government, including the Coastal Resources Commission, which was soon reshaped to be more friendly to business. Before the Republicans gained the upper hand, North Carolina was “a leader in really thoughtful coastal management,” said Geoffrey R. Gisler, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

But the commission’s 2010 report about sea level threw a scare into real estate developers, as well as some coastal residents, who worried that the state would respond with new policies that would crimp their profits or their way of life.

“A lot of folks who have interests in developing areas that are currently vulnerable, and would become more vulnerable with sea level rise, objected to the public finding out that there was this projected significant sea-level rise,” Gisler said. “And so the legislature decided to prohibit looking that far out.”

Gisler said that while its direct effects were limited, the 2012 law went hand in hand with a broader weakening in the state of environmental regulations that developers had opposed.

Under the new governor, the revamped coastal commission produced a report in 2015 that looked forward only 30 years — a “shorter, more credible time period,” according to its chairman, Frank Gorham — and foresaw only 6 to 8 inches of sea-level rise. “Everyone looked at the 2100 time period, and the people that hated it dismissed it completely, and we just lost credibility,” he said of the earlier report.

Robert S. Young, a coastal geology professor at Western Carolina University who had worked on the original report, responded in a newspaper column that “local officials may breathe easier having to look only 30 years down the road, but 6 to 8 inches of sea-level rise are no reason to celebrate.”

North Carolina was not alone in turning away from the direr warnings of climate science. The administration of Gov. Rick Scott of Florida discouraged the use of terms like “climate change” and “global warming” in official communications.

President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and some federal agencies have played down terms like “climate change” in their reports, publications and websites. But the Trump administration’s actions go beyond just words: It is attempting to roll back dozens of environmental and climate regulations.

Michael Mann, a climate change expert at Pennsylvania State University whose work has shown the links between greenhouse gas emissions and sharply rising temperatures, said that the administration’s policies, including a recently revealed effort to relax Obama-era restrictions on energy companies’ release of methane into the atmosphere, will accelerate climate change.

Mann said it was ironic that Hurricane Florence, “fueled in part by bathwater-hot Atlantic Ocean temperatures warmed by human carbon emissions,” came as “the Trump administration engages in another assault on policies aimed at curbing carbon emissions.”

Bob Emory, who was chairman of the coastal commission when the dire 2010 report was released, was at home in New Bern last Tuesday, wondering whether he should pack up and evacuate inland to escape Florence.

He said in a telephone interview that he stood by the report but felt that its purpose had been misunderstood. The commission, he said, had failed “to provide sufficient assurance to local governments and to anybody else that our intention with that report was to provide information — it wasn’t to regulate anybody.”

The election of another new governor in 2016 — Cooper, a pro-environment Democrat — has begun to reverse the shift in the state’s tenor on environmental issues. For one thing, Cooper reappointed Emory to the coastal commission over the summer.

Even so, the Legislature remains in Republican hands. Robin Smith, a new appointee to the commission who served for years as an environmental lawyer for the state, said that, “based on the Legislature’s approach to other environmental issues in the interim, I suspect there’s a high degree of suspicion, bordering on hostility, still, to new regulation based on sea level rise.”

Instead, she said, she expects the commission to concentrate on supplying information and working with county and local governments.

Smith said her first meeting with the commission, scheduled for next week, had been canceled because of the storm. While North Carolina has come under criticism for the law, the state has also been home to some of the nation’s most advanced coastal science.

The leading scientific model used to forecast storm surge and its effect on coastal areas, known as ADCIRC, was created in large part by Rick Luettich, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina.

In a telephone interview during a break from boarding up the windows of his home in Morehead City, on the coast, Luettich noted that before 2012, the state pursued progressive policies that put it in the forefront of coastal management. When the legislature pushed back against the clear scientific evidence underlying climate change, he said, “it came as a shock.”

There is a lesson in that, he said.

“The process of converting scientific research into policy is one that we take for granted at times,” Luettich said. “What we learned is that you can’t take that for granted. We need to have a closer dialogue with policymakers, to make sure we’re on the same page.”