Left Trying Hard to Keep Climate Change Hysteria Alive

RALEIGH – The results are in, and have been for quite a while: Americans aren’t all that concerned about ‘climate change.’

That’s probably because all the hysterical predictions pushed by the environmental Left on this issue have continually failed to materialize. And that’s because the ‘science’ behind it all is chock full of manipulation, deceit, hyperbole, and political agendas.

However, the environmental Left is nothing is not persistent, and the impending doom from global warming myth is being pushed anew lately. Here in North Carolina the media is playing along to scare coastal homeowners with *cue dramatic music* rising sea levels.

“There’s a “disaster” approaching North Carolina’s coast, and it’s not a hurricane. It’s an increasingly encroaching sea, Orrin Pilkey says.

An award-winning Duke University professor emeritus of geology, who is also the founder and director emeritus of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, Pilkey doesn’t mince words when it comes to sea level rise.

“These beaches are doomed,” Pilkey has said, multiple times — most recently in The Washington Post and in an interview with The News & Observer. “The buildings are doomed, too.”

Rising sea levels will likely prove the first global calamity from climate change, Pilkey told The News & Observer. Climate scientists view sea level rise as one of the most obvious signals of a warming planet.

Sea level rise is an imminent threat to North Carolina’s 18 barrier islands — the Outer Banks — and the area just behind, the Inner Banks, which could be two of the most devastated areas, Pilkey said.”

Way to be subtle, Pilkey. The professor is urging residents to move inland, to high ground. He also points to ‘studies’ showing North Carolina waters rising an inch per year (five inches from 2011-2015). One would think THAT would be pretty obvious to someone with a home on the water, not to mention the entire town of Sea Level in Carteret County.

But while it may be ‘obvious’ to climate scientists (or geologists like Pilkey), the people who grew up on the coast – on the beaches, the sounds, the inner banks, in the surf – that dramatic elevation of the ocean in the last decade is somehow, well, not noticeable.

So what is the hard evidence of this doom from accelerating rising sea levels, already rearing its ugly head on the coast of the Old North State?

Erosion. At the beach. Due to storms, and tides, and wave action.

“The costly effort of dredging sand from the bottom of the ocean and piling it onto beaches in an attempt to rebuild North Carolina’s — or any state’s — coastline has been the preferred solution to maintaining the shoreline and protecting coastal properties for generations. But it’s needed more and more, Pilkey said. And “it’s an exercise in futility.”

“You’re holding shoreline where it doesn’t want to be,” he said.

Nags Head beaches in Dare County are eroding at a rate of about 6 feet per year, according to the N.C. Division of Coastal Management.

The town of Nags Head is “spending $48 million — and raising taxes for property owners — dredging sand from the sea floor and pumping it onto beaches,” The Washington Post reported.

Some areas of beach, including near the Bodie Island Lighthouse, are eroding at rates of nearly 10 feet per year, according to NCDCM.

There is constant flux for many parts of North Carolina’s beaches, and barrier islands naturally migrate, but renourished beaches disappear “at least two times faster than natural beaches,” Pilkey said.”

Erosion of beaches IS obvious. And the last statement here is pretty crucial; The Outer Banks are giant sandbars that retreat and advance in an ebb and flow over cycles. Nearly everyone that grows up on the coast is taught this.

Most also understand that the spoils they dump on the beaches for re-nourishment (an admittedly futile task because humans, as ingenious as we are, can’t compare to the power of the Earth’s forces) is of a different character than the sand that naturally accrues and erodes to make for fabulous summer vacations.

As such, that sediment from the ocean floor may indeed have different physical properties that cause it to respond to waves and tides and storm surges differently. If it is denser, it may wash back out to the depths more readily.

These considerations seem to fall by the wayside, though, because…climate change.

You see, it has to be rising sea levels, because rising sea levels are from global warming; and global warming has to be from humans’ prosperous exploits; and prosperous exploits are evil because they accrue and distribute, like beaches, unevenly; and that’s not fair.

So what to do? Oh, let’s warn everyone of impending doom and global calamity so the self-ordained leaders of Mother Earth can make the rules for how the rubes live their lives.

Such is the reasoning of the environmental Left, utilizing the likes of Pilkey to warn of DOOM and talk of studies and point out the obvious, but blaming it on the unfounded.

Read more, unless you’re underwater already, here.