OPINION: North Carolina politicians have decried the climate-change science that makes Hurricane Florence so dangerous | Will Bunch
For Dr.
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And feared.
Earlier in this century, in a bygone era when
If
Armed with the scientific evidence, the
In 2012, it enacted a law ... that essentially outlawed the report and barred state officials from using its findings to make coastal development decisions. It was a big win for wealthy real estate developers and for conservative voters of the 2009-10 tea party movement that had embraced the uniquely American notion that climate science is a liberal hoax.
Speaking by telephone Monday from his campus office in
In 2016, Riggs quit the advisory board rather than further alter his findings to please the pro-development whims of Republican lawmakers. "I'm an older person -- I'm not wasting any more of my life on bull---," he told me. Instead, he works now with a growing network of town and county officials on the Carolina coast who take climate science seriously and are taking steps to fight back.
If you live in
If you don't live in
Of course, many readers are going to say that now is not the right time to mix weather and politics -- because hurricanes and wildfires are becoming the mass shootings of the climate-change debate, where saying anything in a moment of crisis beyond offering our thoughts and prayers to the afflicted is crass and inappropriate. But thoughts and prayers won't help the mostly underprivileged residents of the low-lying Carolinas any more than they saved gunshot victims in Parkland. The reality is there's no better time to talk about our failure to take climate politics seriously than on the eve of a natural disaster that global warming is making worse.
Which leads right into the other thing many readers are going to say, which is that tropical storms have long been a part of life in a place like the Carolinas -- I mean, they have a pro hockey team called the Hurricanes, for cryin' out loud. True, and they've survived the above-mentioned Floyd in 1999, or Hurricane Hugo, a major hurricane that struck the Carolinas in 1989, among others.
But Hurricane Florence is not normal. If the current projections from the
Meanwhile, during the early 2010s -- right around the time that
The response of
"We're destroying the resource, and we'll pay the price in the next few days if this storm comes in," Riggs said, "and these storms keep coming ..."
The maddening thing, of course, is that this is not just a
On the very same day that Trump was warning Southerners to evacuate from
But while we mess up the policy, there's nothing humans can do now to change the course of
Call me a godless cynic, but I don't think
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