Cate Kozak will cover the climate conference that started in Paris this week for Coastal Review Online.

NAGS HEAD — As national leaders and thousands of participants from around the globe poured into Paris this week for what many view as a Hail Mary pass to save the planet from climate change, the town of Nags Head is preparing to host its own modest version of a summit on the issue.

The two-day workshop in Nags Head, facilitated by North Carolina Sea Grant, will involve the community in information sharing and brainstorming about a future with inevitably higher seas.  Coordinators will come to next week’s event armed with perceptions and concerns gleaned from interviews with a cross-cut of residents and officials.

Whether it’s called spring tide, King tide, moon tide or just nuisance flooding, nearly everyone here has noticed that ocean and sound water is breaching dunes and bulkheads more frequently and to a greater degree.  As a result, beach erosion is getting worse.

“The number one thing that jumped out at me is generally, a lot of people agree that sea level is rising,” said Jessica Whitehead, Coastal Communities Hazards Adaptation specialist for Sea Grant. “At least we have agreement that something is changing and we have agreement that something will need to be done about it.”

Formally known as the Vulnerability, Consequences, and Adaptation Planning Scenarios, or VCAPS, the public is invited to participate at Town Hall on Dec. 7 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. and on Dec. 8 from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m.  Local knowledge and input, organizers say, is critical to development of appropriate planning and remediation of climate change.

“It really, I think, is going to be a very useful conversation for the community to have,” Whitehead said.  “It’s just a really flexible way for helping a community to deal with whatever nature throws at it.”

Nags Head is the third community in the state, she said – behind Plymouth and Hyde County – to seek assistance from Sea Grant on addressing climate change.

“How do we make Nags Head more resilient is kind of the bottom line,” said Holly White, Nags Head’s principal planner.

White said the town board had decided at its last retreat to start exploring the potential impacts of sea-level rise to Nags Head, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and Pamlico Sound. The workshop process and Sea Grant’s end report can help guide the town in responding to the local challenges with confidence.

Coastal scientists consider North Carolina’s Outer Banks to be “extremely vulnerable” to the effects of rising seas, but mitigation or adaptation strategies have yet to be tackled by state policy makers.  North Carolina is also one of the states opposing President Obama’s Clean Power Plan that would help the U.S. meet reductions in carbon pollution Obama had promised at the Paris conference, officially the 21^st Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference.

“I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter,” the president said in Paris on Monday, “to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”

At last year’s conference in Peru, more than 180 nations had pledged to cut carbon emissions by using more renewable energy and less fossil fuels. China has also agreed to work toward reducing its carbon output.

Negotiators in Paris are working to nail down an agreement between the nations to keep the rise of global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, invisible line dividing manageable climate change and severe to catastrophic consequences to the Earth and its oceans.

Virginia Burkett, the chief scientist for Climate and Land Use Change at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va., said that the Paris event is not a debate about the science behind climate change.

“It builds on and relies on the science,” she said. “But it is a policy-making event.”

Burkett has authored several of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, reports that the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission’s science panel used in developing its current 30-year draft Sea Level Rise Assessment report.

Burkett said there have been four or five “meta-analysis” of the climate change science, including thousands of articles, books, and peer-reviewed research journals. Of those, 97 to 98 percent of the literature agrees on the science that points to human-caused spikes in greenhouse gases and impacts that include warming oceans and temperatures.

“There are some outliers – and you would expect that,” she said. “But the consensus among scientists globally is very strong.”

According to the state’s sea-level report, the General Assembly does not intend to mandate sea-level policy or a definition of sea-level change for regulatory purposes.

“The current CRC chairman believes it should be addressed more at a local level, rather than coming from the state,” said Michele Walker, a CRC spokeswoman.

The report estimated that by 2045, seas on the Outer Banks could rise between 5.4 inches to 10.6 inches, with a considerably lower rate south of Cape Lookout. The CRC has been directed to study the “economic and environmental costs and benefits to the North Carolina coastal region” of developing sea level regulations and policies, the draft report said.

Walker said that the sea-level rise report is expected to be finished at the Feb. 1 CRC meeting, and delivered to the General Assembly by the end of March.

Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, a member of the science panel and the Shore Protection manager in Carteret County, said that 30-year plan, which will be updated every five years, is consistent with the typical timeframes used in coastal planning.

“I thought the report provided a good tool for the local governments who want to take a hard number and work with it,” he said.

Rudolph said he favors local, rather than state, policy-making to address rising seas, especially when funding realities are considered. “Unfunded mandates and things like that are a big no-no,” he said. “Everybody hates unfunded mandates. I hate them, too.”

Bill Birkemeier, the science panel’s co-chair and a retired coastal scientist who lives on the Outer Banks, said that he has seen sea-level rise with his own eyes. When he moved to Southern Shores in 1980, he didn’t have to worry about storm flooding in his garage. But with Hurricane Irene in 2011, he had to elevate his wife’s vehicle on 2 X 4s to keep the 11-inches of floodwater from the interior of the car.

Birkemeier said that the IPCC report is the best source of data to estimate sea-level rise. “Nothing gets in there without being vetted a million times,” he said.

Still, he said, the estimates based on new sea-level data are “changing by the day,” which tends to make estimation of rising seas a “moving target.”

“Thirty years is relatively easy because all the big stuff happens after 30 years,” Birkemeier said. “There’s more confidence in 30 years. So we need to do this every five years to see if new information moves the curve.”

RALEIGH — The next governor will have to sign off on an assessment of the risks from climate change or put the state at risk of losing millions of dollars in federal emergency-management grants.

New federal guidelines adopted this month require states to include the effects of climate change in their hazard mitigation plans, starting in March 2016. The plans must be approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency before states are eligible for an array of FEMA grant programs. The new guidelines also include a requirement that governors explicitly endorse the plans. The new policy doesn’t affect money states get to recover from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and other federally declared natural disasters.

Becky Hammer, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s water program, said the new guidelines are part of FEMA’s push to hold state’s more accountable. The environmental group had petitioned FEMA to include climate change in its new guidelines for state disaster plans.

“There was a concern that these were paper exercises, that states were developing plans but not putting them in action,” she said.

Connecticut and New Jersey have adopted fairly robust climate-change policies in their disaster plans, Hammer said, but most Southeastern states, including North Carolina, have not.

Gov. Pat McCrory has not made an official statement on climate change, but said during an oil and gas summit late last year that the state would have to be prepared for changes in weather patterns. His office did not return a request for comment on the new FEMA policy.

Hammer said North Carolina’s 2010 Hazard Mitigation Plan included a small section on climate change and promised further review with the next update. But that update done three years later by the McCrory administration was considerably different. Search the document for the term “climate-change” and nothing pops up.

“All mention of climate change was gone,” Hammer said. “It actually went backward.”

Although they require that the future risk of all hazards, including climate change, have to be assessed, FEMA’s new guidelines are not specific enough on what  states will be required to do, she said. “FEMA is not dictating to [the state’s] how to do it,” she said. “That could give some states leeway to look at bad science. It remains to be seen what they’ll see as acceptable.”

FEMA notified the N.C. Division of Emergency Management, which is responsible for the disaster plans, of the new requirement just this month, explained Diana Kees, a division spokeswoman. She said it was too early to predict how the state will meet the new mandate when it updates its plan in three years. Division officials, she said, expect to learn more about the new policy next week at a FEMA conference in Atlanta.

What About Rising Seas?

Sea-level rise will likely come up in those discussions. Most scientists who study climate change expect the word’s oceans to rise dramatically in the future as the climate continues to warm. North Carolina’s low-lying coastline is particularly at risk.

A 2010 state report recognized that acceleration by forecasting a likely 39-inch rise in sea level along the coast by 2100, or almost triple the historic rate. Under pressure from developers and some local governments, the N.C. General Assembly shelved the report three years later.

It was replaced this year by a draft forecast approved by the state’s Coastal Resources Commission, or CRC. Using historic data from five tide gauges along the coast, the report forecasts that sea level will not rise beyond its historic rate. The commission limited the forecast to 30 years in order to avoid the scary predictions. The report will be submitted to the legislature next year for its approval.

Similar projections done around the world come up which much higher numbers, particularly during the later part of this century and beyond as glaciers melt and warmer oceans expand.

While the new FEMA guidelines may be a bit unclear as to what the states are expected to do, there is this unambiguous directive that seems to apply to the potential hazards from rising seas: “Due to the inherent uncertainties with projections of future hazard events, states are expected to look across the whole community of partners (for example, public, private, academic, non-governmental, etc.) to identify the most relevant data and select the most appropriate methodologies to assess risks and vulnerability.”

Will a 30-year assessment that uses local tide gauges and predicts that the ocean off the N.C. coast will behave exactly as it has in the past clear even that low bar?

FEMA has issued some guidance on establishing risk from sea-level rise. A December 2013 fact sheet on developing sea-level rise models said evaluations should be based on models produced by NOAA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and that predictions based on other models and more localized data would have to be reviewed by FEMA before they could be used.

“For a period of only 30 years, the models including and excluding acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise differ to only trivial degrees in their predictions of water levels along the N.C. shores. After that time is when inclusion of acceleration matters,” said Charles “Pete” Peterson, a professor with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City and a member of the CRC’s Science Panel, which wrote the two sea-level rise reports.

He said the FEMA policy change means more than sea-level predictions. “The new FEMA guidelines seem to demand policy changes in addition to adoption of numbers for local sea-level rise” he said.

Peterson said the state needs to update its analysis to anticipate those risks along the coast. “Specifically, the expected water levels during storms need to be added on top of local sea level,” he said. “These add-ons include the height of the wind-driven storm surge and the wind-driven wave height generated locally.”

Money At Risk

If a state plan’s approach to climate change is not acceptable, the state could lose access to grant money from FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance and Pre-Disaster Mitigation Assistance programs as well as money to aid some of the build back after a disaster from the Hazard Mitigation Assistance Program.

Last year, FEMA identified eight N.C. projects totaling $8.3 million for flood mitigation grants and eight projects totaling $448,000 for pre-disaster mitigation grants.

None of this funding appears to be in immediate peril. After the new state Hazard Mitigation Plan was adopted in 2013, the program switched to a five-year cycle. North Carolina’s next plan isn’t due until 2018.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean the state can delay including assessments of climate change risks in planning. Hammer said FEMA has made it clear that climate change is an integral part of its “resilient communities” program and that could influence decisions on grant applications that ignore sea-level rise and climate change impacts.

BEAUFORT – The state’s Coastal Resources Commission gathered on an island near here Wednesday to talk about the latest report from its science advisers on sea-level rise along the N.C. coast.

There were no fireworks this time.

Unlike the last time the commission tackled the subject, no one talked of one-meter rises in sea level. No one denounced the findings or demeaned its authors. No one bemoaned the effects on tourism or coastal land prices. Legislators aren’t likely to find anything in the new report, when it lands on their desks in 2016, that will tie their knickers in a knot and lead to embarrassing bills that are lampooned on cable television and newspaper editorial pages.

It was all rather, well, boring.

“We can all be proud of this report and work done by our Science Panel,” Frank Gorham, the commission’s chairman, said after Margery Overton, who heads the panel, summarized the draft report at the CRC meeting at the NOAA Lab on Pivers Island. “This report gives us a great deal of credibility.”

Frank Gorham

Todd Miller

That wasn’t the word used in 2010 when the Science Panel presented its first report on climate-induced sea-level rise in North Carolina. That report forecast a likely 39-inch rise by 2100 as the climate warms, or about triple the historic rate. Though it was in line with those in similar reports from around the world, the forecast still raised the ire of some coastal developers and local governments, who feared that regulations to head off such a calamitous future would stifle economic development on the coast.

Their howls where heard in Raleigh in 2012 where Republicans, then newly empowered at the N.C. General Assembly, wanted to forbid state and local governments from using the forecast when planning for the future. The effort was ridiculed worldwide as an attempt to outlaw sea-level rise, including a scathing parody by Stephen Colbert on his TV show. Even old King Canute had a brief resurgence in popular media.

Legislators backed off a bit and passed a bill that shelved the report and directed the CRC to issue a revised version. The commission, at Gorham’s urging, then ordered its advisers earlier this year to limit their forecast to 30 years with revisions every five years. Other similar reports use much longer timeframes to capture the expected acceleration in sea-level rise in the second half of the century as the oceans respond to a much warmer climate.

The engineers and scientists on the Science Panel, Overton explained Wednesday, used information from five tide gauges along the coast to come up with a range of forecasts for different coastal regions. Historic data from the gauges, the draft report notes, indicate a mean sea-level rise in the next 30 years of 2.4 inches at Wilmington, 3.2 inches at Beaufort, 4.3 inches at Oregon Inlet and 5.4 inches at Duck on the Currituck Banks.

Regionalizing the forecasts is a directive contained in the bill passed by the legislature and is a great improvement over the single, statewide prediction of the original report, noted Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, a geologist on the Science Panel who directs Carteret County’s Shore Protection Office.

“No other state has done that,” he said. “I think it will be a great benefit as we move forward.”

How high the sea gets depends on where you’re standing on the coast. The rate of rise tends to be higher north of Cape Lookout because the land there is sinking – subsidence, the geologists call it — and is closer to the Gulf Stream, which recent research has shown increases the rate.

The 30-year timeframe that the commission ordered the Science Panel to follow is meant to avoid the scary projections of the original report and others of its kind. They show sea level rising at historic rates until later in the century when they accelerate dramatically because of the continued emissions of gases warming the climate.

The panel, in its report, acknowledged that possibility by including two other predictions that account for the influence of greenhouse gases. Data from the latest forecasts from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the report notes, suggest mean sea level will rise about three more inches then the tide gauges predict over the next 30 years if emissions are reduced from current levels:  5.7 inches at Wilmington, 6.5 in Beaufort, 7.6 at Oregon Inlet and 8.7 at Duck. Add another inch at all locations if emissions continue at peak levels, the report says.

Everyone at the meeting Wednesday seemed to be happy with the report, but there’s a contrarian in every crowd. Todd Miller, the executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation, noted that there was no talk Wednesday about the implications of even a modest rise in sea level over the next three decades.

“Look at what’s happening now with flooding and damage from minor storms,” he said. “How much worse will it be if the sea rises six more inches?”

At the same meeting that the CRC praised a report that attempts to minimize sea-level rise, the commission talked about increasing development near inlets and allowing it closer to the ocean, Miller said. “No one seems to be connecting the dots,” he said.

The draft report will next be sent to Robert Dean, professor emeritus in the University of Florida’s coastal and oceanographic engineering program, and James Houston, a retired engineer at U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for peer review. Then, it will be available for public comment, probably starting in March. A final report will be submitted to the legislature by March 1, 2016.

MOREHEAD CITY – The chairman of the state’s commission that sets coastal development policy deftly defused what could have been the next explosive issue in the politically charged sea-level rise debate by appointing a respected geologist to the commission’s panel of science advisers while passing on nominees who have publicly questioned either the scientific validity of climate change or that seas would rise as a result.

“I really wanted the CRC to be respected,” Frank Gorham, the chairman of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, said yesterday after making the appointment. “The way to do that is to respect the process and to respect the current Science Panel. I don’t agree with some of the personal views of some of the panel members but I respect their credentials.”

Frank Gorham

Gorham and the four other members of the CRC’s Executive Committee met yesterday in a conference call to discuss filling four vacancies on the Science Panel, which is made up of volunteer scientists and engineers who advise the CRC on a wide range of issues. Normally, such appointments are made with little fanfare, but they took on significance this time because the panel’s most pressing job will be to update its controversial 2010 report on sea-level rise in North Carolina.

That report included a forecast of a 39-inch ocean rise by the turn of the next century, which raised the ire of some coastal developers and local governments and attracted the attention of the state legislature, which first wanted to outlaw planning for sea-level rise entirely. After they become the butt of international ridicule, lawmakers instead passed a law in 2012 that forbids state and local governments from using the forecast until the CRC presents a new report to the N.C. General Assembly in 2016.

In this charged atmosphere, CRC and Science Panel members nominated 14 people to fill the four vacancies or to become so-called “ad-hoc” members who would assist the panel in devising the new report. Many on the list are noted marine geologists or coastal engineers. Some, though, have no apparent expertise in coastal geology or engineering or in climate science but are frequent contributors to web sites that question various aspects of climate change or have close ties to groups that fiercely opposed the original sea-level report.

Gorham avoided them and appointed Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, a geologist who heads Carteret County’s Shore Protection Office, to the Science Panel. The three other spots should remain vacant until the panel completes its report, Gorham told his Executive Committee yesterday. He said he saw no need to appoint the ad-hoc members.

“I believe with pretty good certainty that we have all the expertise we need on the panel to produce a good report,” Gorham told the committee.

The committee members agreed with their chairman’s assessment and offered no objections.

Rob Young

Some of the nominees clearly had agendas, Gorham said after the meeting, and he wanted to avoid the media circus that would have surely evolved had any of them been appointed. Gorham would have also likely faced a mutiny by the scientists currently on the panel. Many said they would quit if any of the nominees with credentials they considered questionable were chosen.

Gorham heard the grumblings, but he said they didn’t affect his decision. “I really didn’t do this to avoid a mutiny,” he said. “This was done to respect the CRC and the Science Panel. I want to be known as trying to be fair and to have respect for people’s opinions and the process.”

Rudolph, Gorham said, was the right choice. “He’s a hard worker and he does his homework,” he said. “He met all my criteria.”

The long-time manager of Carteret’s Shore Protection Office, Rudolph is familiar with most of the issues the Science Panel will tackle. “I know a bunch of the people on the Science Panel already, both professionally and personally. Working with them won’t be a problem,” he said. “I think my reputation as a straight shooter will be of help on the Science Panel.”

Rudolph will be a good addition to the panel, said Rob Young, a geologist and panel member who heads the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

“I think the chairman has come up with a workable compromise that will keep the Science Panel together,” he said. “I was afraid that we were on the verge of losing an institution that was important to the state. He’s walked a fine line to keep us together.”

Left: Antarctica actually contains two ice sheets: the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets. The studies released last month concern the glaciers that flow into the Amundsen Sea, the small embayment below the Antarctic Peninsula in West Antarctica. Illustration: NASA. Right: The six glaciers in the first study are shown on a close-up map of the Amundsen Sea sector. The second study focuses on one of them, the Thwaites Glacier, which drains a large area of West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Illustration: Eric Rignot

Two scientific studies on melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were published recently, driving a firestorm of sensationalist headlines in the New York Times, National Geographic, CNN and other websites. Dire warnings of unstoppable glacier melt and runaway sea level rise abound. Is this all media hype? If you read no further, the answer is no — this is real.

What’s Going On?

Three major ice sheets remain on Earth today: Greenland, West Antarctica and East Antarctica. Of these, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, though smallest by volume, is considered the most vulnerable to future melting and collapse. This is because the outer margin of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits on bedrock that lies below sea level, unlike the other major ice sheets. Such a “marine-based” ice sheet is sensitive to melting both on the top of the ice, from above-freezing atmospheric temperatures, and below the ice, from incursion of high-salinity ocean water.

Today, the flow of warm (relative to ice), salty ocean water beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is constrained by the contact between the ice sheet and the ground beneath the ice. This is referred to as the “grounding line.” The position of the grounding line relative to the topography beneath the ice sheet is critical to determining the stability of marine-based ice sheets in response to warming.

Specifically, if the grounding line is located on a topographic upslope or ridge, the ice sheet is stable after initial retreat, because thinning and retreat of the ice sheet in response to warming is compensated by a shallower grounding line depth. If the grounding line is located behind a ridge or on a downslope, there is no topographic “catch” for the grounding line, so the ice sheet is unstable and will quickly melt and retreat.

The studies found that the grounding lines of the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctic Ice Sheet have rapidly retreated. Melting from below causes the ice sheet to thin until it is light enough to float. Illustration: Bethan Davies/AntarcticGlaciers.org

Why does this matter? Glaciers from the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica contain enough ice to raise sea level by four feet, and have rapidly melted over the past two decades. The two scientific studies published recently provide complementary approaches to addressing the susceptibility of these glaciers to future melting. Eric Rignot, an Earth science professor at the University of California-Irvine and lead author of one study, and his colleagues provide an updated analysis of the topography of the bedrock underneath glaciers in the Amundsen Sea. The authors find that rapid retreat of these glaciers observed over the past 20 years is closely tied with elevation of the bedrock underneath the ice. Importantly, improved imaging of the bedrock underneath the current glaciers shows that, inward of the ridge upon which the grounding lines are presently located, there are no major topographic ridges or other features that may compensate for a thinning ice sheet. If these glaciers continue to melt as they are today, they will eventually enter a highly unstable regime where the entire glacier is susceptible to collapse.

Ian Joughin, who studies the physics of glaciers at the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues use a numerical model to forecast the timing over which such a collapse will occur. Their model correctly reproduces observed rates of melt and glacial retreat over the past 20 years, which gives confidence that the model accurately describes the timing and magnitude of melting in this glacier system. Projecting forward, the authors find that the Amundsen Sea glaciers reach a scenario of complete collapse within 200 to 500 years, and indeed are likely already experiencing an early stage of collapse today.

“Hysteresis”

Many phenomena in the Earth’s climate system are subject to hysteresis –– the dependency of an outcome on not just the current state, but on previous states as well. Hysteresis is perhaps easiest explained visually, as a variable that does not respond in a linear fashion to changes in a causal variable.

Hypothetical example illustrating the difference between linear responses and hysteretic responses. Note: this represents a major oversimplification of the climate system, and the exact relationships between CO2, temperature and sea-level rise shown here should not be accepted as scientific fact.

In the hypothetical example shown at right, the forcing agent (CO2, orange) causes a linear response in temperature (red). When CO2 rises or falls, temperature follows with a corresponding rise or fall. However, the bottom graph of sea-level rise (blue), which is assumed to be forced by temperature, shows a response that is very different from its forcing. The sea-level rise response has inertia from the previous state (increase in temperature), and so is unresponsive to the change in forcing (decrease temperature). In this hypothetical example, sea-level rise exhibits hysteresis. Even if a future corrective action was applied to ameliorate CO2 levels and force a reduction temperature, the sea-level rise persists.

The example is illustrative of perhaps the scariest aspect of Amundsen Sea glacier melting: its hysteresis. Without shallower bedrock to “catch” the grounding line, there is no known mechanism by which collapse of a marine-based ice sheet can be prevented, or reversed. Although glaciology’s knowledge of ice sheet-bedrock interactions is imperfect, the Rignot and Joughlin studies suggest complete melting of the Amundsen Sea glaciers could happen regardless of any future events.

What Happens Once Glaciers Collapse? Take Miami, Florida as an example. Miami-Dade County has a population of 2.5 million, yet averages a mere six feet above sea level today. With a four-foot sea level rise from melting of the Amundsen Sea glaciers, 40 percent of urban Miami-Dade County will be underwater. Moreover, under such a sea-level rise it would take only a two-foot storm surge to inundate 60 percent of modern-day Miami. A recent study estimated that the Miami region receives a two-foot or larger storm surge every ten to twenty years due to hurricane activity, meaning the majority of modern-day Miami would be flooded on a semi-regular basis due to natural storm activity following collapse of the Amundsen Sea glaciers.

Sea-level effects from Amundsen Sea glacier collapse would extend far beyond South Florida. Globally, an estimated 634 million people, almost 10 percent of the global population, live within 30 feet of sea-level. Although more detailed demographic-elevation estimates are not yet available, a significant fraction of this population would likely be endangered from a four-foot sea-level rise, particularly in heavily populated, low-lying areas of Southeast Asia.

Can This Be Stopped?

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet at 3 a.m. on a December day. Photo: Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Science

With such risks from sea-level rise, halting the melting of the Amundsen Sea glaciers would appear to be of paramount importance. Any approach to engineer a cessation of melting, however, is quickly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the problem. Melting of the Amundsen Sea glaciers today is driven by incursion of warmer ocean water; ceasing the melting would thus literally require cooling down the ocean.

Alternatively, the melting of the Amundsen Sea glaciers could be counteracted by an increase in ice gain from additional snowfall on the top of the glacier. However, the volume necessary is staggering: 18.6 billion Goodyear Blimps full of water would have to be frozen onto the Amundsen Sea glaciers each year, just to counteract the ~100 gigatons of ice lost to melt each year observed at present. As the ice sheet continues to destabilize in the future, this volume is expected to rise significantly.

If there is any good news, it is that the rate of collapse of the Amundsen Sea glaciers is estimated to be on the order of several centuries. In his blog, Andy Revkin points out the stark difference between geologic and societal meanings of “collapse;” for geology, a “sudden collapse” still requires multiple human generations. So we have plenty of time to prepare.

In addition, science is never settled. If the incursion of warm oceanic waters in the Amundsen Sea slows down, perhaps the glaciers will recover and avoid collapse. Of course, the opposite — increased warming and an even more rapid collapse — is equally plausible. We may yet learn of new mechanisms that lead to stabilization of marine-based glaciers. But with the state of scientific knowledge at this moment, there is little reason to suspect we can avoid, at a minimum, four feet of sea-level rise in the coming several centuries. Take your talents to South Beach soon.

Learn More

• NASA Press Release on Amundsen Sea Glacier Melting
• NASA Primer on West Antarctic Ice Sheet
• Science Journal News Release

ATLANTIC BEACH – The state’s Coastal Resources Commission took the first tenuous steps along a seemingly old but tortuous path, but its new chairman charted a different course this time, one that he hopes will make for a smoother ride and lead to a happier destination.

Hoping to avoid the potholes of the past, the commission heeded the urgings of its chairman yesterday and directed its panel of scientific advisors to once again take a look at the contentious issue of sea-level rise and a warming climate, but to limit their assessment this time to how high the ocean might get 30 years in the future and not forecast, as they did the last time, on how high it might be in 2100.

Frank Gorham III

Bob Emory

It was that long-range forecast that got the commission in such hot water – pun intended – the last time it tackled the subject. That was four years ago, and the resulting study, which included a 39-inch ocean rise by the turn of the next century, was revised a number of times but was so controversial that it raised the ire of some coastal developers and local governments and attracted the attention of the legislature, which first wanted to outlaw planning for sea-level rise entirely. After they become the butt of international ridicule, lawmakers instead passed a law in 2012 that forbade state and local governments from using the forecast until the CRC presented a new report to the N.C. General Assembly four years later.

Frank Gorham III wants things to go better this time around. A resident of Wilmington and a property owner on Figure Eight Island, Gorham was appointed last year by Gov. Pat McCrory to lead a commission revamped by the legislature. “Probably the most politically sensitive subject we’re going to deal with is sea level-rise,” he told the commission. “I only get calls about sea-level rise. We want to do this right. We want to be objective and we want to be fair.”

To avoid the scientific uncertainty that comes with trying to forecast what the ocean might do a century from now, Gorham urged the commission to direct its Science Panel, which is made up of volunteer scientists and engineers, to restrict itself to how the sea might behave in the next 30 years and then do follow-up examinations every five years, making adjustments to the forecast as needed. Gorham called the result a “rolling 30-year timetable.”

The state sets its oceanfront setback rules on the average 30-year erosion rate and banks mortgage houses for 30 years, Gorham said. Why not sea-level rise, he asked.

“Whatever we do has to have credibility,” he concluded. “So 30 years is a good place to start.”

Most of the commissioners supported the approach, except for Bob Emory of New Bern who chaired the commission when it undertook the first sea-level rise study. All other similar scientific assessments, he noted, use a 100-year forecast period to account for the long lag time before the ocean responds to a warming climate. The CRC would never set policy on such a long-range prediction but it would provide an opportunity to educate people about what the future might hold, he said.

The commission, Emory suggested, should allow its science advisers to assess future sea-level rise with the same long-range methodologies used in other studies around the world and then base any policy on shorter term forecasts.

“I don’t know why we can’t do both,” he said. “If we limited it to 30 years, the work we do will not have much credibility on the national and global scales.”

The commission voted 9-1 to accept its chairman’s proposal. Emory was the only dissenting vote. Suzanne Dorsey of Wilmington abstained.

After the vote, Gorham urged the commissioners to stick to the script. “I implore everyone to say we made a business decision based on 30 years,” he said. “Let’s stick with that and move on.”

The great majority of climate scientists expects the world’s oceans to rise at an accelerated rate this century as the climate warms. Ocean water expands as it heats up, called thermal expansion, and melting glaciers will add their volume of water to the oceans. How quickly and how much the seas rise would depend on how warm the climate gets and how fast the glaciers melt.

That uncertainty accounts for the wide disparity in sea-level rise predictions beyond the next couple of decades. For its original report, the Science Panel reviewed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific reports and recommended in a draft policy that the state prepare for a sea-level rise of up to 55 inches by 2100, with a 39-inch rise being likely. It forecasts very little change from the historic rate of sea-level rise for the next 30 years, but the rates then accelerate dramatically. Those findings are in line with the results of other reports done around the world.

Recent events may have made those forecasts too conservative, however. Two teams of scientists released papers this week that reached the same conclusion. A significant chunk of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun to disintegrate and, owing to the ice sheet’s peculiar topography — much of it lies below sea level — this process is now unstoppable. The melting of that ice sheet alone, the scientists suggested, could account for a 10-foot rise in global sea level over the next 200 years.

But Pete Peterson won’t worry about that.  He’s a researcher at UNC’s Institute of Marine Sciences and the only member of the Science Panel to attend yesterday’s commission meeting. Thirty years is now his target. “We can do that quickly,” he said. “For 30 years all the forecasts are crunched together. So we won’t have much to do.”

The commission may have opted for the practical approach, Peterson said, but not necessarily the one that will best protect future generations. “I’m maintaining my house, but if I ask my children if they’d be happy if it burned down in 30 years, I think they wouldn’t be,” he said.

Pete Peterson

Rob Young

The effects of a rising sea are already being felt along the nation’s coast, explained Rob Young, a Science Panel member, and are dramatically evident during storms like Hurricane Sandy two years ago.  “I’ve grown more concerned that we’re not doing a good job responding to storm damage, erosion and coastal hazards that we know exist now,” said Young, a geologist who heads the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

The state, he noted, is preparing to spend $500 million to bridge washed out portions of N.C. 12 on the north end of Hatteras Island. “That part of the island is disintegrating,” Young said. “When we’re doing things like that, the sea-level rise debate is a distraction. The first step in responding wisely is to address the problems we’re having now.”

The first potential bump in the new road on which the commission has embarked will come next month when Gorham chooses people to fill the four vacancies on the Science Panel and the so-called “ad hoc” members who will work with the panel on the new sea-level rise study. Commission and Science Panel members have nominated people for the slots. Some have publicly denied or questioned the existence of climate change. If he chooses any of those candidates, Gorham could have a mutiny on his hands among the scientists on the panel, and other nominees may have misgivings about volunteering their time.

Young hopes that doesn’t happen. “Science Panel members have always done a good job putting aside their business interests or their personal preferences as conservationists and reaching decisions that they thought were best for the state. The panel has been a real service to the state and I hope that continues,” he said.

Gorham said yesterday that he intends to announce his appointments by the end of June so that the Science Panel can start work on the new study. A draft is due to the commission by March 31 next year and a final report to the legislature a year later.

North Carolina was supposed to be the good example in a documentary that examines climate change and its projected effect on sea-level rise and super storms.

Little did film director Ben Kalina know when he and his crew arrived in North Carolina in early 2012 to shoot portions of “Shored Up” that the political climate here on sea-level rise was about to put the state in the national spotlight and raise the stakes in an ongoing debate about the realities of global warming.

Ben Kalina

“Shored Up” looks at the issues coastal communities in New Jersey and North Carolina, specifically Long Beach Island, N.J. and the Outer Banks, face with the prediction of more intense hurricanes and a rising sea. Folded into the story is what has become a highly polarized debate about global warming and an economic drive to rebuild in storm-ravaged areas and develop on sensitive coastal lands.

The feature-length film includes footage taken in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, which devastated the Jersey shore in 2012.

“My goal is to get people to think about what climate change is going to mean to them and how we’re going to start to grapple with it,” Kalina said. “When they hear climate change they think of global warming and something that is far away. This film gets audiences to immediately start thinking about what this means locally. The sea-level rise projections that the film talks about are pretty dramatic along the coast.”

Kalina wanted to show how North Carolina’s coastal policies planned for the long term as opposed to New Jersey.

“New Jersey developed real close to the edge, but places like North Carolina haven’t developed their coastline as heavily,” he said. “North Carolina had erosion setback rates for development. There are a lot of different policies that have been put in place over time.”

Shortly before heading south to start shooting, Kalina found out the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission was holding a meeting. During that meeting in 2010, the CRC’s Science Panel on Coastal Hazards projected that, based on current scientific evidence, sea levels could rise 30 inches by 2100.

The report ignited a simmering debate that erupted in the N.C. General Assembly in 2012 with House Bill 819, which initially outlawed accelerated sea-level rise in state planning. The bill’s supporters argued that tide gauges were more reliable indicators of future sea-level rise than computer model. The history of those gauges indicated a rise of no more than eight inches this century  and that sea levels are receding in some coastal areas.

H.B. 819 grabbed the attention of the national media. It was poked fun at on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” a clip of which is featured in “Shored Up.”

Legislators later passed a more moderate bill, which bans planning for sea-level rise for four years.

Kalina said he did not set out to make a politically-charged documentary, one with an array of interviews with scientists, environmentalists, surfers, politicians and global warming protagonists whom discuss their views on everything from coastal development to the sea-rise debate.

Stan Riggs, the N.C. coast’s preeminent marine geologist and a member of the CRC’s science panels, talks extensively in the film and vents his frustrations about how the panel’s report was received by state lawmakers. The N.C. Coastal Federation’s Tracy Skrabal, a coastal scientist, discusses development along the N.C. coastline. Also featured is a NC-20 representative. That group represents development interests and some counties along the coast.

This photo of a roller coaster at Seaside Heights, N.J., that fell into the Atlantic Ocean became an iconic image of an iconic storm, Sandy. Photo: Mike Groll, AP

“I think North Carolina in many ways is kind of the epicenter of the debate right now,” Kalina said.

One venue where the discussion, at least not from information provided in “Shored Up,” is unwelcome is at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

In November, the museum’s management decided to cancel a showing of the film.

Museum Director Emlyn Koster said in a statement that he and the museum’s program committee based their decision on whether the hour-long film was the “best way to present an important issue” to its visitors.

“It would be a disservice to the people of North Carolina who generously funded the construction of the museum, and who are joined by other visitors from all other U.S. states and numerous other countries, if we were to maintain that showing one organization’s film constituted a comprehensive approach to an issue as significant and complex as sea level science,” Koster’s statement read.

Koster stands by the decision and does not plan to show the film, said Emelia Cowans, the museum’s assistant communications director.

The film has received high marks among film critics, including a review in Variety, which describes the documentary as one that, “eschews hysteria, preachiness and self-importance in favor of calm, persuasive scientific arguments.”

“At this point I’m pretty happy with what the documentary is doing in terms of generating a conversation,” he said. “Climate change is something, I think, seems really abstract. What it really boils down to is, are we planning for the here and now or are we planning for the future.”

Last of two parts

NEW YORK – Ask scientists who study ancient climates what worries them the most about a higher CO2 world and the likely answer will involve sea-level rise.

The levels of the world’s oceans and seas are ephemeral things. They rise and fall with the tides once or twice a day depending on location. Take a step back from these daily variations, though, and the “level” of the sea is anything but constant.

From the perspective of ancient climates, changes in sea level can be thought of as the addition or subtraction of water. The world’s oceans are really big bathtubs: Add water to them and their levels rise, remove water and they fall. On geologic timescales, the primary way to change the amount of water in the oceans is through the growth and decay of large ice sheets on land. Icebergs floating in the water don’t count. Like ice cubes, they merely displace water. Their melting doesn’t add any more water to the world’s bathtubs, just as a melting ice cube doesn’t cause the water in the glass to overflow.

Rob DeConto

At the peak of the last ice age about 20,000 years ago, global sea level was nearly 400 feet lower, with large ice sheets on North America and Europe accounting for much of the water removed from the ocean.

Today, most of those ice sheets are long gone, but they didn’t just gradually disappear since the last ice age. High rates of sea-level rise are particularly evident during warming intervals in the past, when atmospheric CO2 levels rose rapidly and the ice sheets melted. “We know from the geologic record that sea level has changed at rates of meters per century (during these times),” says Maureen Raymo, research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Present-day rates of sea-level rise, about an inch per decade, are tiny in comparison to those in the geologic record. “In the last century, thermal expansion has been the primary driver of sea-level change,” notes Rob DeConto, professor of climatology at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Liquids expand when heated, even a mass of water like an ocean, and this warming of the oceans has dominated recent sea-level rise.

Every indication is that thermal expansion will not dominate rates of sea-level rise in the future, however. As Earth’s climate marches toward equilibration with present-day CO2 levels, the climate will continue to warm. And this warming threatens the stability of a potentially much, much larger source for sea-level rise — the world’s remaining ice sheets.

“In this century, melting glaciers will dominate sea-level rise,” adds DeConto. “We are talking about an ability to change how the planet looks from space.”

Earth’s Ice Sheets and Sea Level Contributions: Left: The Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) is the Northern Hemisphere’s largest. Right: Antarctica has two ice sheets, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), and the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS). In red is the sea level rise that would result from complete melting of ice sheet. Images from Google Earth.

Present Day Ice Sheets

To understand future sea-level change, you need to understand the ice sheets — both in terms of how much they could raise sea level, and how susceptible they are to melting with future warming.

There are three main ice sheets on Earth today. The Greenland Ice Sheet, covering nearly all of Greenland, is the only large ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere. Over two miles thick in places, the ice sheet has an estimated 1.8 million cubic miles of ice, or enough to raise sea level by 24 feet if all the ice melted, according to research published in 2001.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica is split between two ice sheets. The smaller West Antarctic Ice Sheet has a similar volume of ice to Greenland and would raise sea level about 16 feet if it melted. In contrast, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is by far the largest ice sheet in the world. Over two and a half miles thick across a broad area of Antarctica, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet contains nearly 14 million cubic miles of ice, and if melted, would raise sea level an almost incomprehensible 170 feet, according to 2001 research. For context, Jockey’s Ridge near Nags Head is 100 feet high.

Ice Sheet Stability

How much warming can the ice sheets withstand before they collapse? It is the million-dollar question for Earth scientists, and an area of intensive research today. DeConto and colleagues have pioneered approaches using computer models to estimate how sensitive ice sheets are to changes in temperature and CO2. Using paleoclimate information, they demonstrated that the growth of ice sheets is highly sensitive to atmospheric CO2 levels.

Maureen Raymo

Peter deMenocal

Ice sheet loss is more complicated than ice sheet growth, however. For one, the sensitivity of the ice sheet to melting depends on whether the end of the ice sheet is located on land (“land-based”) or in the ocean (“marine-based”). An ice cube in a glass of water melts much faster than one put on the counter; accordingly, marine-based ice sheets that terminate in the water exhibit faster melting rates than those that end on land.

A second complication is that ice sheets can have “multiple equilibria,” according to DeConto. From his modeling work, DeConto concludes “the Greenland Ice Sheet is relatively stable, even at today’s CO2 levels. But if you removed the Greenland Ice Sheet, it could not grow back.”

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is the only current ice sheet that is largely marine-based, and is DeConto’s main concern for sea-level rise in a 400 ppm world. “The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is bathed in ocean water. Once the ocean gets too warm to support these ice shelves, most of the ice sheet will be lost. And sea level will then rise 3.5 meters (11 feet),” says DeConto.

Even though the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would likely take at least several hundred years, stopping the melting once it started would be nearly impossible. With warmer ocean water driving the melting, “you would have to cool the oceans down in order to get the West Antarctic Ice Sheet back (and prevent sea-level rise),” adds DeConto. “That’s essentially an impossible geoengineering problem.”

Although the Greenland and East Antarctic Ice sheets are not considered risks for catastrophic melting at current CO2 levels, some degree of melting from both would also contribute to sea-level rise. As a result, “If you stabilize CO2 at current levels, a five-meter (16-foot) rise in sea level is not out of the realm of possibility,” cautions Raymo. “Think about what that would do to the world’s population centers”. An interactive feature published last fall by The New York Times gives several examples of how sea-level rise could affect coastal urban areas in the United States.

DeConto is quick to caution that modeling studies of ice sheet growth and decay have plenty of limitations. Alarmism is, unfortunately, not one of them. “Time and again, we have a problem making models as sensitive as they need to be. They are not sensitive enough to match the geologic record. If anything, our models are too conservative. And that’s scary,” says DeConto.

Changing Cities with 12 Feet of Sea-level Rise: Twelve feet of sea-level rise would occur with melting of the marine-based portions of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Images:  Baden Copeland/New York Times.

Only Getting Slushier

Unfortunately, 400 ppm CO2 is not this story’s end. According to NOAA, atmospheric CO2 levels were increasing by 2.65 ppm per year in 2012, the highest year-over-year increase since recordkeeping began in 1959. If these trends continue, “the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will deglaciate, it’s only a question of time,” says DeConto.

At current trajectories, atmospheric CO2 levels could approach 800 to 900 ppm by the end of the century. “That plunges you into a time of warmth from 50 million years ago that you wouldn’t even recognize,” says Raymo. “All the ice sheets would eventually melt over the next few thousand years. Sea level would end up being over 60 meters higher.”

Were that to happen, everywhere east of I-95 in North Carolina would eventually be underwater. Fayetteville would become beachfront property.

The economic costs associated with these scenarios are difficult to contemplate. As it is, “We’re starting to see the economic costs of climate change now, especially in insurance,” contends Peter deMenocal, professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia.

“Consider federal home insurance for coastal cities. At what point of sea-level rise will that become unaffordable for the federal government?” says deMenocal. “We’re talking about trillions of dollars here.”

And the major players in global sea level—the ice sheets — have yet to join the game.

NAGS HEAD — By now, most people along the coast of North Carolina can see for themselves that the sea is rising. Pine trees in estuarine marshes are dying from saltwater intrusion; ground water levels seem higher; beach erosion has worsened.

The tough message Michael Orbach, a Duke University marine science professor, had recently for an Outer Banks audience: Get used to it.

There is nothing that humans can or will likely do between now and 2100 that will significantly slow the rate of sea level rise, he said at a presentation last week at Jockey’s Ridge State Park, sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Dare County.

“The implication there is we can’t avoid it, so we’re going to have to adapt to it,”  said Orbach, a former director of Duke’s Marine Lab in Beaufort.

Slide after slide of graphs, maps, photographs and charts in his presentation showed consistent evidence that with the start of industrial revolution in the 1800s, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, global temperatures and the seas all started rising.

And as air gets warmer, Orbach said, the ocean gets warmer. Water heats up slowly, but once it does, “it’s going to stay warm for a long time,” slowing currents and altering weather patterns.

Sea level projections, he said, are based not just on computer models , which skeptics perceive to be subjective, but also on actual readings from at least 1,000 tide gauges starting from 1900 and core samples from glaciers.

Likelihood of Shore Protection:A $2 million effort maps the likelihood of shore protection along the East Coast as sea level rises. The maps divide coastal low lands into four categories: developed (shore protection almost certain), intermediate (shore protection likely), undeveloped (shore protection unlikely) and conservation (no shore protection). The North Carolina portion of the study was led by North Carolina Seagrant. For further details, see the report on the summary of North Carolina findings.

“Every year we get more data,” he said, “the estimate goes up.”

Over the past 500 million years, global sea level has gone up and down by hundreds of meters, Orbach said. The average sea-level rise worldwide over the last 100 years has been one foot, he said, but the projection for the next century is at least one meter, or 39 inches.It will not be easily reversed, Orbach noted said.

“This is the important thing about sea level rise — it’s a permanent state,” Orbach said. “For the next several thousand years, it’s only going to go up.”

Still, Orbach said there are a multitude of reasons to decrease use of carbon-based fuels like oil and coal, including clean air and energy independence.

With its long coastline and huge low-lying estuarine system, North Carolina is going to see wide-ranging affects from rising seas, especially along the low-lying Outer Banks, he told the audience of about 60 people.

And it will be more evident on the sound side than along the oceanfront. Storm surges from even small storms will be more destructive; tides will be higher; increased erosion will require more engineered solutions.

Septic systems will be the first casualty of higher ground water levels and eroded waterfronts.

After becoming the butt of jokes for passing a law last year that required sea-level rise rates to be based on historical trends dating back from 1900, and not to include data on accelerated rates, North Carolina legislators eventually reached a compromise to refrain from passing new sea-level regulations until 2016. Meanwhile, the best available science will continue to be gathered.

“The Europeans think we’re a riot,” Orbach said later in an interview. Other countries — Germany, for instance, is planning 500 years out for climate change impacts — are actively seeking ways to cope with future sea-level rise.

Partisan politics here has hampered any reasonable approach to the issue, he said.

“The U.S. House of Representatives is a truly silly place right now,” he said. “They will not even look at — no less fund — anything that has the words ‘climate change’ in it.”

Despite the intransigence, a national climate assessment, mandated, but never funded, by Congress in 1990 is expected to be released in April. Universities and private researchers had to do pay for much of the work.

Even with the United States lagging on the global stage in its climate policies, North Carolina is behind other coastal states, like Maryland, New Jersey and New York, which have implemented state policies to cope with rising seas.

Michael Orbach

A 2012 study by the U.S. Geological Survey said that seas along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Massachusetts are rising three to four times faster than the global average. The Outer Banks, New Orleans and the Florida Everglades, all at or below sea level, are the most vulnerable areas in the nation.

Some developers and real-estate brokers in North Carolina have questioned the validity of the sea- level science. They also said that creating policy based on a projected one-meter rise would hurt economic development. Orbach said he understands the concern of skeptics, although it doesn’t change the reality.

“The problem is that the effects at some point will be so great, they’re afraid,” he said.  “They don’t know what to do. And so there’s a tendency to say ‘Maybe it’s not true.’  I think part of it is fear of economic loss and economic turmoil.”

If he were a planner on the Outer Banks, Orbach said, the first thing he would do is map the area and calculate the effects of  sea-level rise up to three feet, similar to what his Duke student Jeffrey Allenby did for the Bogue Banks in his 2011 master’s project.  Allenby used GIS data to model the effects of sea-level rise on the sound and ocean sides of the island.

As described in the paper’s abstract, the maps could assist development of new regulations.

“In particular, policies pertaining to the issues of migrating wetlands, septic tank permitting, zoning of buildings and transportation will likely need to be reconsidered if towns are going to successfully adapt to and mitigate the effects of higher sea levels,” Allenby wrote

His maps, which were part of Orbach’s presentation, showed areas of Pine Knoll Shores and Atlantic Beach completely inundated with spring tides or continually submerged at mean high tide.

With the projections, planning for infrastructure and roads could work around future conditions in a proactive manner, Orbach noted. Regulatory solutions include setbacks, rolling easements —allowing structures to move back from the water — conservation easements and buyouts, where threatened properties are purchased by the government and removed.

“The problem is, if we don’t start planning for it, everything is going to be so much worse when it does start happening,” he said.

Planning, Orbach said, could keep future growth away from vulnerable areas, strengthen building codes and design and consider the effects of future sea-level rise before issuing plat approval or road elevation variances.

The legal system, he said, also has to adapt to “become trusting of these future judgments.” As it is now, if a planning board rejected an application because of projected sea-level rise, most likely the applicant could sue in court and win, Orbach said.

Ideally, the entire estuarine and ocean shoreline in the state should be mapped,he advised. Once the mindset changes to accepting the permanence of high water, it won’t be as difficult to deal with it.

“Think of it as storm surge that doesn’t go away,” he said. “The good thing is, because it’s a little off in the future, there’s time to plan.”

For instance: What will a community do with the existing infrastructure? Where will it put all of the stuff it wants to keep? Should construction of infrastructure be stopped in increasingly vulnerable areas?

Through the ages, Orbach said, history has shown what people do when conditions become too difficult to live: They move somewhere else.

“The good news is,” he said sardonically to the audience of mostly middle aged or older folks, “you don’t have to worry about it too much.”

That may be what is contributing to the slow pace of government response.

“Beyond current political cycles, there’s very little incentive for politicians to do anything about it now,” he said, “because they’re not going to be here either.”

OCRACOKE — The Ocracoke Working Watermen’s Association on Jan. 19 will host a training session for a project to monitor baby oysters, or spat. Students and volunteers will be trained to collect and count oyster offspring.  The project, sponsored by North Carolina Sea Grant, is part of a larger effort to understand why North Carolina’s oyster population is in decline.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, scientists have puzzled over why the entire batch of 100 million free-swimming baby oysters at Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in coastal Oregon  have died. The conclusion they reached is alarming, at the least. The struggling larvae were unable to form their protective shells because of highly acidic pH levels in the ocean. High acid levels decrease carbonate ions needed for shell production.

The acidity is the result of excessive carbon dioxide, or CO2, in the ocean, absorbed from the Earth’s atmosphere. The CO2 is the by-product of the burning of fossil fuels –coal and oil, primarily — which also causes global warming or climate change.

In late October, 2012, Hurricane Sandy, later dubbed a “super storm,” grabbed headlines and awoke the American public to the reality of carbon dioxide-induced climate change. Scientists and climatologists had been trying to raise awareness for years, but it took a major disaster to make most people accept its imminent presence and danger.

Few people are aware even now, however, of what some scientists call the “evil twin” of global warming; ocean acidification. This equally serious threat is already showing up in the Pacific Ocean and polar seas, where the cold, nutrient-rich waters from the deep are naturally more acidic than surface waters. While the full brunt of ocean acidification is not expected to hit for decades, it is expected to affect marine ecosystems globally and might even factor into North Carolina’s oyster decline.

Climate scientists define ocean acidification as the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth’s oceans, caused by the absorption of human-caused carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It was once believed that this was a good thing, as it buffered the full effects of global warming on land. Scientists now think differently.

A decrease in pH means an increase in acidity, which can be catastrophic for ecosystems. Acid rain provides an illustration. Emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide from vehicle exhaust and coal-burning power plants are carried by the wind, often for hundreds of miles, and deposited as acidic rainwater. It can peel paint, corrode steel and erode stone buildings and statues. Acid rain has damaged crops, weakened or killed plants and raised pH levels in freshwater lakes so high that fish and other aquatic animals have died. Acidification may be invisible to the eye, but some of upstate New York’s most beautiful lakes are lasting testaments to its deadly qualities.

Before people began burning coal and oil, ocean pH had been relatively stable for 20 million years, according to scientists at the Natural Resources Defence Council, an advocacy group. Over the last 250 years, roughly coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, oceans have absorbed 503 billion tons of CO2, causing a 30 percent increase in ocean acidity. At current rates, ocean acidity is predicted to more than double by 2100.

Corals and coral reefs are severely threatened by processes such as ocean acidification: A, “Healthy” coral reef with living Acropora palmata and good water quality. B, Degraded coral reef with dead A. palmata and poor water quality. Processes such as ocean acidification are rapidly transforming healthy reefs into degraded reefs in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean and western tropical Atlantic Ocean regions. Photos: Ryan Moyer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

This could have serious consequences for near-shore bottom-dwelling ecosystems and for calcifying organisms such as crustaceans, molluscs and echinoderms, such as star fish and sand dollars. Corals, which require very high levels of carbonate, are at even greater risk. Coral reefs, which provide habitat for one fourth of all marine species, could at the present rate of acidification be extinct by 2100.  Pteropods, a kind of plankton that lives around the world and are a major part of the marine food chain, are also especially vulnerable.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been studying falling pH in the ocean and its impact on marine ecosystems for three decades. Its studies have revealed lower reef-building rates in corals, the loss of protective shells in free-swimming zooplankton and lower survival rates of larval marine species including fish and shellfish. The studies predict that there will be substantial socio-economic effects, including decimated fisheries and reduced protection against storm surges as coastal reefs disappear.

The study of ocean acidification is a relatively new science, and all the ramifications are not yet clear.  A September 2012 issue of Scientific American stated that rising CO2 in the oceans affects the mental abilities of some marine life. It cited impaired ability in clownfish to discriminate kin and predators and mollusk larvae wandering farther afield into unsafe waters, making them more susceptible to predation. Other studies document depressed metabolic rates in jumbo squid and depressed immune systems in blue mussels.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute recently conducted a study that revealed unexpected results. It found that while corrosive carbonic acid (formed from dissolved CO2) destroys the shells of clams, oysters, scallops and conchs, CO2 appears to increase the production of calcium carbonate, needed for shell-building, in such crustaceans as lobsters, blue crabs and prawns. Clearly, scientists are a long way from understanding all the effects of CO2-saturated oceans.

In late 2012, scientists from 37 countries met in Monterey, California to discuss these issues. “The Ocean in a High-CO2 World” symposium looked at possible solutions, including spreading vast amounts of limestone on the ocean surfaces. Lime is alkaline and would buffer the acid. The state of Washington recently established a blue-ribbon panel to come up with a plan to cope with ocean acidification, the first state to do so. It outlined 42 steps, including adaptation, remediation, monitoring and reduction.

The warm coastal waters of North Carolina and other states on the Eastern Seaboard have not yet shown the effects of rising pH. Nathan Hall, a researcher at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, said that there are already such huge variations in acidity due to pollutants and runoff from the land that, while the long-term effects of ocean acidification are alarming, they are not yet measurable here.

Ocracoke waterman Gene Ballance, who works closely with oyster research and restoration, says that he does not believe acidification has been considered as a cause of oyster decline in Pamlico Sound.  Susan Massengale, a spokeswoman with the N.C. Division of Water Quality, explained that the issue is in the research stage in North Carolina and that the state is waiting until “the science catches up with itself.”

Scientists at National Resources Defense Council, however, think “this change is happening fast, and it will take fast action to slow or stop it.”  All experts agree that the only definitive solution to ocean acidification is to reduce the amount of CO2 humans release into the atmosphere.

Ocean scientist Lisa Suatoni says that our CO2 emissions “may soon challenge marine life on a scale not seen for tens of millions of years.” Oceanographer Jean-Pierre Gatluso predicts that unless the present trend is interrupted, “the oceans will become hot, sour and breathless.”

RALEIGH — When the newly re-written Coastal Management Policies Act and its controversial sea-level rise section was finally debated in the N.C. House Tuesday, there was little doubt that the issue still causes a rapid rise in temperatures.

The final version of the bill, which passed the House 68-43 on the last day of the legislative session, drops the mandate in previous versions that required using only historical data and a linear model to develop a state standard for anticipated future sea-level rise because of global warming. Instead, the bill puts a four-year moratorium on developing a new model for sea-level rise and lays out in detail what the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission must take into account to set a standard. The bill requires, for instance, that the state set rates in at least four separate regions of the coast and develop both oceanfront and estuary estimates.

Rep. Pat McElraft

The vote culminated a month-long debate in the N.C. General Assembly over a draft policy that was first presented to the commission by its scientific advisors in 2010. That version recommended that the state prepare for a sea-level rise of 39 inches by 2100, or more than triple the historic rate. The forecast immediately came under fire from development interests and some coastal counties. They questioned the science behind the report and feared that regulations to protect against such a drastic rise in sea level would stifle economic growth on the coast.

The nearly hour-long debate on the bill turned into the last substantial row of the 2011-2012 legislative session as GOP House members angrily denounced those who ridiculed the bill and tore into the science panel’s report. The version that passed the Senate was the subject of hundreds of news reports, editorials and blog posts around the world. TV satirist Stephen Colbert mocked it on his popular “Colbert Report.” The House refused to take up that measure, and a conference committee came up with the compromise that the House approved Tuesday.

Rep. Pat McElraft, R-Carteret, who brokered the compromise with the Senate bill’s backers, said she and her staff paid a price. “I’ve had nasty phone calls from all over the United States,” she told her colleagues. “It may seem silly to some of you people, but it’s not silly to those of us on the coast.”

McElraft accused the science panel of using the only the most extreme model of climate change and ignoring historical data. “Over 30 global scientists have debunked the science panel’s science,” she said.

McElraft was referring to a list of the scientists provided by NC-20, a nonprofit group made up of some coastal counties and development interests on the coast that led the opposition to the CRC policy. Few of the scientists on the list have published research on sea-level rise or global warming in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

All the bill does, McElraft explained, is to ask the CRC to go back and study the issue, which the commission had already planned to do. McElraft said the panel needs to take other ideas about global climate change into account.

“What we have done is to ask them to use blended models, to use historical data, to use some real science, some science that we can all trust when we start making laws here in the state of North Carolina, when we start affecting property values of our citizens on the coast.”

The CRC’s science panel reviewed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific reports in coming up with its forecast, which was vetted by out-of-state experts and was in line with forecasts used by major scientific organizations around the world and by several countries and other states.

McElraft’s criticism of the report was not the harshest.

“What we’re calling science is not science,” Rep. Frank Iler, R-Brunswick, said before launching into a sharp criticism of the 2010 report. “I think we need a lot more information before we cost people hundreds of millions of dollars and disrupt everybody’s planning and change our whole attitude on permitting.”

He accused the “unelected science panel appointed by this unelected commission” of “making rules based on a fantasy basically.”

The advisory committee – formally known as the Science Panel on Coastal Hazards – by law can’t devise rules. The CRC asked it to produce a report on future sea-level rise, which didn’t recommend new development rules. Even before the debate reached Raleigh, the CRC had watered down the original report through several revisions. The latest two-page version contains no forecasts for future sea-level rise but acknowledges that sea-level rise “is occurring and presents a gradual but significant coastal hazard along the coast of North Carolina.”

Rep. Pricey Harrison

Rep. Frank Iler

Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, is a former CRC member who worked with the science panel. She defended the scientists, noting some are among the top coastal experts in the nation. She did thank House negotiators for helping to eliminate the Senate’s proposal. “That really was embarrassing to the state,” she said.

Harrison said the state needs to pay attention to issue. Given the state’s long, gently sloping coastline, North Carolina is highly vulnerable to a rise in sea level, she noted.

“I think scientists agree we need to prepare for what’s coming and not stick our heads in the sand,” Harrison said. “We need to consider sea-level rise when we’re developing policies on coastal management and I think it’s a terrible idea to put a moratorium on the Coastal Resources Commission.”

Robert Emory, chair of the CRC, said the most unfortunate parts of the debate over the sea-level rise legislation were the attacks on the science panel, especially when they got personal.

“The level of vitriol that’s been part of the discussion has been unfortunate,” he said. “You can disagree with someone without calling into question their scientific integrity.”

If the bill avoids a veto by Gov. Beverly Perdue, the CRC is “obviously going to obey the law” moving forward on its sea-level rise work, Emory said.

He said he is not sure what led to the bill, but suspects that legislators were concerned that the commission was planning on developing new regulations.

“That was one area of confusion,” he said. “The CRC had no intention of adopting a regulatory rate of sea-level rise.”

Braxton Davis, director of the state’s Division of Coastal Management said he and his staff are starting to plan on how to move ahead under the new direction laid out in the law, which is in synch with the timeline for updating the sea-level rise report. He called the language in the bill “workable.”

“I think we can update the science in the way the bill directs us to,” he said.

One complication is the requirement that that a new report include sea-level rise estimates for at least four regions along the coast. Davis said it may be more difficult in areas where gauges have not been in place for very long, but the legislation allows for using data from other areas as “proxies” in developing estimates.

The sea-level rise legislation wasn’t the only change in coastal policy dictated by the bill. It also includes portions of McElraft’s original legislation on ocean setbacks that passed the House last year but wasn’t taken up by the Senate. It grandfathers roughly 200 properties along the coast from setback requirements that went into effect in 2009.

The new rules apply only to structures of 5,000 square feet or greater. In the event they are destroyed, owners would be allowed to rebuild using the old standard of 60 feet from the line of vegetation rather than the new 120-foot standard.

Davis said the division is also looking over the legislation’s requirement for an updated study of inlet hazard areas and the designation of areas of environmental concern around Cape Fear.

• Listen to the House debate on sea-level rise

RALEIGH — With Gov. Beverly Perdue still mum on whether she’ll veto the newly-minted budget or the controversial fracking bill sent to her last week, legislators pushed ahead to bring the short session to a close as early as Tuesday.

The last-minute flurry of bills included a number of changes to environmental rules and policy, but as legislators worked into yesterday evening, an expected compromise on controversial legislation on measuring sea-level rise had not surfaced.

The compromise, worked out in a conference committee after the House rejected the Senate’s sea-level rise policy, is said to place a moratorium on state rules meant to plan for a 3-foot rise in seas by 2100. The ban would remain in place until 2016, when an updated scientific assessment on sea-level rise is to be presented to the N.C. General Assembly.

Rep. Pat McElraft

Rep. Pat McElraft, R-Carteret, the conference committee co-chair, told the Carteret County News-Times that the compromise won’t include a controversial piece of a N.C. Senate bill that the House rejected. The new bill, she told the newspaper, won’t limit calculations of future sea-level rise to historical trends, but it won’t allow the 39-inch rise that was forecast by a state panel of scientific advisors two years ago.

The bill will authorize the panel to update their report for the legislature, McElraft said.

“We are asking for more science, we are asking for legitimate science, science that didn’t just use one model out of hundreds of models out there,” McElraft told the newspaper.

The discussions by the conference committee coincided with the release of a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey that identifies a 600-mile “hotspot” along the Atlantic coast from Cape Hatteras to New England, where sea-level rise is taking place at a pace three to four times faster than the global average. Researchers think that a slowing of the Gulf Stream may be responsible for the increased rise in sea levels. Climatologists have long speculated that a warming climate would affect the Gulf Stream.

More Regulatory ‘Reform’

Bills that did make it through this week include the Regulatory Reform Act of 2012, which follows on last year’s Republican push to “reform” regulations that they say are hindering  economic growth. Like last year, the bill has drawn fire from environmentalists for continuing to make it harder for the state to draft and implement rules. But the new reform act, which includes a widely-varied dozen sections, is being criticized as a vehicle for favors.

Although Republicans who control the legislature said they were to out to evaluate rules and rewrite them to make them clearer, the bills of the past two years seem to have a different aim, noted Sam Peasall, director of the Southeast Land, Water and Wildlife Program for Environmental Defense.

“What they did instead was parcel out a lot of bits and pieces to benefit specific constituencies,” Pearsall said.

He called the latest package of reforms, “an Easter basket of little presents for small groups of people.”

For instance, the reform bill was one of several that included language delaying new stormwater rules in the Jordan Lake watershed in the Piedmont. Greensboro was pushing for the delay, which would favor several Triad developers. Coastal legislators supported the delay.

Sen. Harry Brown, R-Onslow, the Senate’s majority leader, said he understood the desire on the part of legislators in the Piedmont to slow the process down.

“On the coast, some of the rules have come at us so fast,” he said.

Sam Pearsall

Also soon to be on its way to the governor is the final version of an omnibus set of amendments to state environmental laws.

Among its many provisions are modifications to buffer requirements in the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico river basins.

Rep. Mitch Gillespie, R-McDowell, said the latest version of the bill includes a compromise worked out between the real-estate and home-building interests and the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources over the buffer changes.

Also tucked in the bill is a revision of the composition of the Marine Fisheries Commission and the grants committee of the state’s Fishery Resource Grant program requiring more regional representation along the coast.

Ferry Tolls Delayed, Maybe

A supplement to the budget includes a year’s delay in ferry tolls. The bill would delay the tolls due to take effect July 1 for another year. The change was part of an array of adjustment rolled into a budget supplement this week. The original budget bill has yet to become law. Perdue has until midnight Sunday to either sign the budget, veto it or let it become law without her signature.

Beach Re-Nourishment

The Senate approved a bill that requires Carolina Beach to share about $1.2 million set aside in the state budget for a beach re-nourishment projects with its neighbor. If bill becomes law, the New Hanover Board of County Commissioners will have final say in how the money should be divided.

NAGS HEAD — Supporters of the N.C. Senate’s now-infamous sea-level rise bill warned that property insurance rates will go through the roof if the state were allowed to plan for the three-foot rise in ocean levels that most scientists expect by the end of this century.

The insurance industry in the state is caught in the middle of an issue that could have enormous impact on their future bottom line — depending on what happens to the fiscally-troubled National Flood Insurance Program. Those in the insurance industry, however, doubt that legislative action on sea-level rise will have any effect on property rates.

“The state of North Carolina doesn’t tell the National Flood Insurance Program how to set the rates,” said Fletcher Willey, owner of a Nags Head insurance agency. “A bill in the North Carolina General Assembly does not mean anything to the National Flood Insurance Program.”

But there’s no guarantee that private insurers won’t have to provide flood coverage in the future.

Those in the business of insuring property are at a loss, so to speak, on how to respond to a potentially dire but slow-moving threat that is buffeted by powerful, and conflicting, political winds.  Not only could the risk, whatever it is, be far in the future, it is currently more the federal government’s headache than that of any private insurer.

“The perils we insure against are wind, lightning and hail,” said Ray Evans, general manager of the N.C. Rate Bureau. “As a result, the rising sea levels really do not come into our calculus.”

Although the National Flood Insurance Program by default insures nearly all property in flood zones nationwide against flooding, one of the proposed reforms of the program is privatization.

The Beach Plan, a state-run pool of private insurance companies in the state, provides wind and hail coverage for most property along the coast.

Gina Schwitzgebel

Gina Schwitzgebel, general manager of the N.C. Joint Underwriting Association and the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association — the official name of the Beach Plan — said in an e-mail that, by law, rates are set by the Rate Bureau, with an added surcharge of 5 percent for wind and hail coverage and a 15 percent surcharge for homeowners’ insurance.

Evans said that the statute provides the framework under which the bureau operates, and lawmakers can change the law however and whenever they see fit. “It’s how we exist,” he said. “They have a great deal of authority.”

The insurance commissioner has some discretion in implementation of the law, Evans said, but he must abide by the statute.

State Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.

In general, climate change and its potential impact have gotten the attention of the insurance industry, which is immediately concerned about property damage from disasters created by increased storm surge and wind destruction from powerful hurricanes and tornados. Sea level rise as a specific issue is not yet an action item.

“From our perspective, it’s hard for insurance companies to figure out how rising sea levels might affect risk of loss in coastal areas because it’s proceeding at such a slow rate,” said Robert Detlefsen, vice president of public policy for the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, a national trade association that represents 1,400 members. “And insurers, when they write homeowners policies, they are writing policies that are in effect for 12 months.”

Insurance companies establish rates by studying historic data, he said. In the last 10 years or so, actuaries have also been using catastrophe models developed by specialized firms that incorporate climate and other data to calculate projections.

Even with the best data, he said, the industry is still subject to political will, especially if a rate hike is requested.

Often, the rate increase is denied, and the insurance providers — as happened in North Carolina — decide to no longer provide the coverage.

“No company wants to go insolvent,” Detlefsen said, adding that sometimes states force companies to provide coverage. “That question helps to explain why insurers are very much interested in the health of the National Flood Insurance Program.”

Flooding is notoriously difficult to predict and extremely expensive to insure against, which is why Congress by necessity in 1968 created the federal flood insurance program. The intent was to reduce flood damages with better management while providing an affordable flood insurance program for property owners.

Mortgage companies now require federal flood insurance policies in flood-prone areas. Critics of the program say that numerous property owners file claims year after year for repeated damage, and that the artificially low premium rates in effect subsidize irresponsible development in areas subject to flooding.

By statute, the program is barred from projecting any future consequences, so floodplain maps and models do not account for potential sea level rise, or projected erosion rates.

Starting in 2001, North Carolina became the first state to write the state floodplain maps for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, working as a cooperating technical partner, said Randy Mundt, outreach coordinator for the N.C. Floodplain Mapping program at the state Department of Public Safety.

Since then, he said, floodplain maps, which are available digitally online, have been updated in all 100 counties. The goal is to update them every five years, and so far eight counties have preliminary new updates. The 30-year-old coastal flood hazard model used in mapmaking is also in the process of being updated.

As a result, he said, the state has some of the most accurate floodplain maps in the nation.

“We’ve had great leadership and support for this,” Mundt said, “which has saved taxpayers an enormous amount of money.”

Mundt said determination of base flood elevation is calculated by the current conditions, and the frequent map updates reflect changes in conditions. Although FEMA maps are snapshots of “today,” communities have the option to adopt a flood damage prevention ordinance that would require consideration of projected future conditions in development standards.

Wake County, Greensboro, Wilmington and Cary, which are affected by riverine flooding, have such plans in place, but Dare County, which statewide has the highest coverage amount of flood insurance, does not.

According to statistics on the FEMA website, as of April 30, 2012, unincorporated Dare County had 10,192 federal flood insurance policies in force, covering $2,434,993,100 worth of property, with $6,280,109 in premiums paid for the policies. The second-highest property coverage statewide was in unincorporated New Hanover County, with $1,519,013,900.

In the 2012 Dare County Land Use Plan, it states that the county planning board decided to “reserve judgment” on initiatives addressing the potential threat of rising seas “due to the lack of consensus on the issue” and the ongoing debate about the impacts of climate change and global warming.

A 2001 FEMA report on how the national flood insurance would be impacted by a rise in sea level, based on United Nations projections of a 1-foot to 3-foot increase by 2100, concluded that the rating system could readily respond to a 1-foot rise, and would have until 2050 before seeing impacts of a 3-foot rise.

The report recommended that FEMA should continue to monitor scientific projections on future changes in sea level and encourage measures that mitigate the impacts of sea level rise.

“The 60-year timeframe over which this gradual change occurs provides ample opportunity for the NFIP to consider alternative approaches to the loss control and insurance mechanisms of the NFIP and to implement those changes that are both effective and based on sound scientific evidence,” the report said

The report, assuming continued development trends, estimated the increase in the expected annual flood damage by 2100 for a representative insured property subject to sea level rise at 36 percent to 58 percent for a 1-foot rise and 102 percent to 200 percent for a 3-foot rise.

Contacted this week, a FEMA spokesperson, speaking only on background in an e-mail, said that data on sea-level rise, although not reflected on flood insurance rate maps, does incorporate the most current available flood hazard and risk data and applies the latest available science.

BEAUFORT – A state meeting on sea-level rise a month or so ago would have drawn a few planners and maybe a handful of scientists from the nearby marine labs. Yesterday, though, the room was packed to hear a committee of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission discuss the state’s tortured, but now famous, draft policy on sea-level rise.

“I don’t think I’ve seen this many people at a planning meeting,” Tancred Miller, a coastal policy analyst for the state Division of Coastal Management, noted before outlining the latest changes to the policy for the CRC’s Estuarine and Ocean Committee.

That’s what worldwide media attention will do. The budding policy, which has quietly gone through several revisions over the past two years, fell into the glare of the media spotlight after the N.C. Senate began considering a bill a month ago that was widely interpreted as preventing the state from using modern scientific techniques to forecast how high the Atlantic Ocean might get this century because of global warming.

Melvin Shepard Jr.

The Senate was reacting to the CRC’s draft policy that was first presented by its scientific advisors in 2010. That version recommended that the state prepare for a sea-level rise of 39 inches by 2100, or more than triple the historic rate. The forecast was in line with the ones used by major scientific organizations around the world and by several countries and other states, but it immediately came under fire from development interests and some coastal counties. They feared that regulations to protect against such a drastic rise in sea level would stifle economic growth on the coast. They were much more comfortable with the Senate’s prescription, which would have forced the state to prepare for an 8-inch rise this century.

Googling “sea-level rise and N.C.” will produce a list of hundreds of newspaper stories, TV reports, blog posts, editorials and columns from around the world. Most aren’t complimentary. In fact, they’re downright scornful, accusing the state of ignoring science and trying to make global warming illegal. Stephen Colbert, the TV comedian, devoted five minutes of his popular “The Colbert Report” to thoroughly skewer the bill and its backers.

“This is a brilliant solution,” Colbert said of the bill, his tongue firmly implanted in his cheek. “If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law that makes the result illegal. Problem solved.”

The current version of Senate bill died Tuesday after Republicans who control the N.C. House refused to take it up for a vote. It will now go to a committee of senators and representatives to work out an agreeable compromise. A plan is brewing that would prevent the CRC from using climate models that forecast accelerated rates of sea-level rise this century until the state completes a study of the science behind those forecasts. Legislative backers of such an approach think the study could take as long as five years to complete.

Whether such a plan can avoid another round of scorn remains to be seen. Melvin Shepard Jr. hopes so. He’s a CRC member, the owner of a commercial-fishing supply store in Sneads Ferry and the president of the N.C. Coastal Federation.

“I don’t want to see us become the subject of ridicule,” he said before yesterday’s meeting. “Even the BBC took shots at us.”

There’s not much left in the draft policy to poke fun at or raise eyebrows over. The various revisions have thoroughly diluted it. “Watered down,” is the way David Webster, a CRC member described it yesterday.

Miller noted in his presentation to the committee that most of the controversial topics, such as forecasts for sea-level rise and recommendations for regulations, were removed from the policy last year. But Bob Emory, the CRC’s chairman, directed the committee at the last CRC meeting to take another look at the draft policy to eliminate anything that might be considered controversial and to ensure that the policy is simply aimed at fact gathering and education.

“It is my hope that this committee will develop sea-level rise policy that the CRC could adopt,” Emory said yesterday.

Bob Emory

Not much needed changing, Miller said when he presented his latest edits yesterday. A few words were changed here and there and a few sentences deleted or recast. A new revision allows the CRC to seek information about sea-level rise from people who don’t serve as science advisors.

Maybe the most significant revision came from the audience after Miller’s presentation. The policy noted that it “shall” be revised every five years to reflect the latest scientific research. Charles Jones, a retired director of the division, suggested changing the verb to “should.”

Miller made the change, thus removing any obligation that the policy would be updated, and the committee voted unanimously to accept it and the others. The CRC must now adopt the policy. The commission is scheduled to discuss it at its meeting today on Pivers Island, but Emory doesn’t expect that it will be voted on.

David Weaver, a retired assistant manager for New Hanover County and a member of the CRC’s citizen advisory group, wonders how helpful the policy will be to county engineers wanting guidance from the division before designing a new sewer plant or roadway.

“What kind of helpful information would the division be able to provide?” Weaver asked after the meeting. “There is no range of forecasts, no guidelines, no recommendations.”

Just having a policy will help, noted Braxton Davis, the division’s director. It will allow the division to collaborate with other state or federal agencies, prepare educational materials and conduct research, he said.

“Given the sensitivity of this issue, the policy is very important as to how we would move forward,” Davis said. “Without a policy, there would be some questions about the role of the division on this issue.”

Shepard is just glad something was done. “At least we have something on the books that you can read,” he said. “You can build on that.

Coastal Review Online will post a roundup of coastal legislative news every Friday while the N.C. General Assembly is in session.

RALEIGH — Unfazed by a heavy barrage of worldwide criticism and outright ridicule by sources ranging from Scientific American to the “Colbert Report,” the N.C. Senate’s Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources Committee yesterday approved a new version of a bill that restricts the use of scientific modeling in state and local public policy and regulations to predict future sea-level rise.

Although the new version dials back some of the language from a previous version aimed at how sea-level rise is to be determined, the bill would still prohibit any “rule, ordinance, policy, or planning guideline that defines sea level or a rate of sea-level rise within a coastal-area county” which falls outside of an official state rate of rise

Under the legislation, determining that rate falls to the Coastal Resources Commission, which is restricted in the bill from using accelerated sea-level rise models if they are not “consistent with historical trends.”

At the committee hearing, bill sponsor Sen. David Rouzer, R-Johnston, said there is no scientific consensus about the rate of sea-level rise and that a state science panel’s recommendation on a rise of one meter by 2100 did not take into consideration that rates were different for different parts of the coast.

Sen. David Rouzer

Sen. Harry Brown

He said regulations based on accelerated sea-level rise would have a huge negative effect on the coastal economy and that the new legislation was intended to put “guardrails in place” in developing sea-level rise projection.

“Science should be based on real hard data,” said Rouzer, who presented the bill. “Just because there is a group of folks that project the sea-level rise does not mean the sea will rise. There was consensus years and years and years ago that the earth was flat; turned out to be round.”

Sen. Harry Brown, R-Onslow, defended the bill, saying it’s a reaction to the rapid increase of environmental regulations on the coast. “It’s just time we slowed this stuff down and take a look at it,” he said. “It’s got to make some common sense.”

Rob Jackson, a Duke University professor who specializes in global environmental change, was the lone dissenting voice. He told the committee they were moving counter to the broad scientific consensus about sea-level rise.

“It’s already clear to the scientific community that the rates of sea-level rise are accelerating,” Jackson said. “We know why they’re rising because of warmer temperatures and ice melting. This bill basically says we can’t use the best scientific information to protect people along the coast of North Carolina.”

Legislators are wading into a debate that has been going on for two years as the state’s Coastal Resources Commission grappled with planning for sea-level rise. In 2010, the commission’s science panel recommended that the state prepare for a sea-level rise of up to 55 inches by 2100, with a 39-inch rise being likely. That recommendation drew fire from coastal developers and some coastal counties. They pushed the commission to consider only the rate that the ocean has risen in the last 100 years. Extrapolated to 2100, that would be about 8 inches.

Though the science panel reaffirmed its findings in April, the commission is in the process of writing a policy on sea-level rise that won’t contain the panel’s forecast or policy recommendations.

In a statement sent to the Senate committee on Wednesday, four of the scientists who served on the panel said the new version of the bill still has major problems. Geologists Rob Young and Steve Benton at Western Carolina University and David Mallinson and Stan Riggs at East Carolina University said the bill contradicts the overwhelming scientific consensus that sea-level rise will happen faster in the next 100 years than it has in the past and ties the hands of localities that would like to plan pro-actively for these changes.

Rob Jackson

They also questioned the method for determining sea-level rise in the bill. “The source of this methodology is unclear, but it does not come from the State’s own expert panels,” they wrote. “The methodology has not been vetted or peer-reviewed in any transparent fashion. In our opinion, it is not scientifically valid, nor useful for understanding the changes that may challenge the economic vitality of the coastal region in the future.”

But the new version did win tentative support from the League of Municipalities thanks to the addition of a section allowing local governments to use accelerated projections for non-regulatory purposes. Erin Wynia, policy analyst with the league, said the language allows the cities flexibility in protecting public infrastructure, which was a major concern of some coastal cities.

The bill now goes to the full Senate for consideration, where Todd Miller hopes rationality prevails.

“Today wasn’t a good one for North Carolina,” the N.C. Coastal Federation’s executive director wrote in his blog. “It was the day when our elected leaders decided to turn their backs on the state’s long and proud history as a leader in research, technological achievement and marine sciences. It was a day they took us backwards, to a time when science was suspect and unfounded beliefs held firm.”

Bill Ends Factory Fishing for Menhaden

An Omega Protein vessel fishes for menhaden.

North Carolina and Virginia are the last two states on the Atlantic coast that allow large-scale purse-seine fishing for menhaden, a key bait and industrial fish that researchers say plays an important role in maintaining healthy coastal waters.

But a new bill, sponsored by Sen. Harry Brown, R-Onslow, would eliminate the practice in North Carolina and with that the half-dozen trips into state waters by boats from Omega Protein, a Reedsville, Va., based company that is the only enterprise using the methods described in the legislation.

Last month, the state’s Marine Fisheries Commission voted to ban the practice, a move that Omega and others have mounted a legal challenged to stop.

In a hearing on the bill Thursday, Al Dudley, a Carteret County fisherman, told the Senate Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources Committee that he and other North Carolina fishermen depend on the work from Omega Protein. He asked that the company be allowed at least a short six week season in the late fall.

Southport Sen. Bill Rabon, said the menhaden fishery is critical because of the fish’s impact on estuaries and other coastal waters. He said it was time to end purse seine fishing because the species is being overfished to the point where it might not come back.

“It’s an industry that’s killing itself,” Rabon said. “We can save the fish and save the estuaries or watch the estuaries die slowly with it.”

Senate Still Working on Budget

Lawmakers wrapped up work this week with the Senate yet to unveil its tweaks to the budget the N.C. House passed last week.

Senate leaders say they have been at work on their version of the budget bill and expect to take up the legislation next week. The bill is expected to be heard in the full Senate Appropriations and Finance committees next Tuesday with floor votes to follow. Once the Senate votes on its version of adjustments to the state’s biennial budget, House and Senate negotiators can begin work on a final version.

RALEIGH — A bill that could be introduced when the N.C. General Assembly convenes Wednesday would prevent state agencies and local governments from planning for the higher seas that many scientists expect later this century as the climate warms.

Instead, the bill requires that any state forecast for future sea-level rise be based on the historical rise of the last century, and it prohibits state agencies and institutions and local governments from developing their own forecasts based on a different standard.

Dr. Rob Young

The Senate Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources Committee was scheduled to hear the bill Thursday, but that meeting has been cancelled.

The proposed bill is a substitute for House Bill 819. That bill, sponsored by Rep. Pat McElraft, R-Carteret, dealt only with oceanfront setback requirements for existing structures. It passed the House last year but wasn’t taken up the Senate. Under legislative rules, the bill can be considered in the so-called short session.

The substitute bill, though, adds language that describes tight rules on how the state develops a sea-level rise rate, a contentious issue that the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission has struggled with for more than two years.

The great majority of climate scientists expect the world’s oceans to rise at an accelerated rate this century as the climate warms. Ocean water expands as it heats ups, called thermal expansion, and melting glaciers will add their volume of water to the oceans. How quickly and how much the seas rise would depend on how warm the climate gets and how fast the glaciers melt.

After reviewing the scientific literature, the commission’s science panel recommended in a draft policy in 2010 that the state prepare for a sea-level rise of up to 55 inches by 2100, with a 39-inch rise being likely. The recommendation has drawn fire from NC-20, which represents development interests and some coastal counties. It has questioned the science used by the panel and worries that development restrictions to implement the policy would hinder economic growth in coastal counties.

The proposed bill would limit forecasts for future sea-level rise to what the ocean along the N.C. coast did last century. Using that standard, the state would plan for rise of about 12 inches by 2100.

Determining the rate would fall to the N.C. Division of Coastal Management. Language in the bill says the rates “shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900” and that “(R)ates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.”

Jeffrey Warren declined to comment on the bill or what spurred it, saying it was policy not to comment on legislation that has not been introduced or made public. He is a senior policy advisor on science matters to Sen. Phil Berger, the Senate president pro tem, and a geology professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.

Rob Young, a geology professor at Western Carolina University and a member of the commission’s science panel, called the language on sea-level rise in the bill “bad science.”

“I think the Senate is within its rights to develop a sea-level rise policy,” he said. “What I don’t like about the bill is the science.”

Young said if the bill becomes law the legislature would be choosing a path that runs counter to the findings of the National Academy of Sciences and “every major science organization on the globe.”

It would also make North Carolina the only state to adopt the historical standard and ignore evidence of a more rapid rise. “Every other state in the country is planning on three-feet of sea level rise or more,” he said.

Delaware, for instance, is adopting a plan for sea-level rise of up to 60 inches by the end of the century. Southeast Florida is projecting a 9- to 24-inch rise by 2060, and the California State Lands Commission is preparing for a 55-inch rise by 2100.

Other states haven’t seen development grind to a halt because of their plans, he said, and they’ve allowed planners to develop responses to an accelerated sea level.

“This bill requires the state of North Carolina to live in total ignorance of that,” Young said. “It basically prevents DCM (Division of Coastal Management) from even considering that sea level rise in the future might be different than it is today.”

Michele Walker, spokesperson for the division, said the agency is reviewing the legislation but has not taken a stand on it. Walker said division officials have asked for some “technical clarifications” on the methodology, specifically on monitoring the rise in estuaries. Walker said the Coastal Resources Commission, which must ask the division to develop the official state sea-level rise rate, according to the proposed bill, is still reviewing the draft policy and has been “leaning toward historical rise” as the standard.

Bob Emory, the commission’s chairman, said he has not seen the new legislation and declined to comment on it until he and other commission members have had a chance to review it.

The state’s League of Municipalities is also taking a hard look at the bill because it states that only the state’s coastal counties may adopt rules, ordinances, policies and planning guidelines related to sea-level rise and that they must use state’s authorized rates.

Scott Shuford

Erin Wynia, a policy analyst, said the league is trying to gather feedback from its members on the proposed bill. She said the main concern is how much it might impact local planning. “What cities and towns do not want to see in the bill are restrictions on policies at the local level. This bill does appear to do that,” she said.

Scott Shuford, a former planning director for Onslow County and the author of a climate handbook for planners published by the American Planning Association, agreed that the bill will make the state unique since most governments worldwide are heading in a different policy direction.

“It’s very difficult to legislate nature,” he said.

The effect of the bill might not be felt at first, Shuford said. The science panel’s research, he said, doesn’t show much of a deviation between the historical and accelerated rates of rise for about 25 years.

“That’s the timeframe for most long-range planning,” he said. “But when you’re talking about public infrastructure that lasts 25 to 50 years it’s more problematic.”

It’s also more of a problem with larger projects, he added.

“If you’re building a sidewalk it may not make a big difference if the legislature says sea-level rise is ‘X’ and the scientists say it’s ‘Y,’” Shuford said.

But bridges, airports, sewage plants and other types large projects require much longer-range planning, he said

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BEAUFORT – The state’s long, tortuous and at times rocky journey towards a planning policy to address an expected future of higher seas came through this coastal town yesterday and left a little closer to its destination.

The N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, at its meeting on nearby Pivers Island, charged one of its committees with the task of turning a two-year-old draft policy that met with stiff resistance from development interests and some coastal counties into a friendlier document focused more on education and designed to draw less ire.

Bob Emory

Margery Overton

Robert Young

“Where we are with sea-level rise is in the education and dialogue phase,” Bob Emory, the commission’s chairman, said after the meeting. “We have to get people comfortable discussing this.”

That uneasiness became apparent in March 2010 when the commission’s scientific advisors, its Coastal Hazards Science Panel, completed a requested draft policy on future sea-level rise. The oceans, the panel noted after reviewing the best available science on the subject, are expected to rise at an accelerated rate this century because of a warming climate. Ocean water expands as it warms, called thermal expansion, and melting glaciers will add their volume of water. How quickly and how much the seas rise depend on how warm the climate gets and how fast the glaciers melt.

Because of that uncertainty, the panel offered a broad range of forecasts, noting that the Atlantic Ocean along the N.C. coast could rise 15 to 55 inches by 2100, or more than double the historic rate. That prediction is in line with forecasts made by other states. Delaware, for instance, is adopting a plan for sea-level rise of up to 60 inches by the end of the century. Southeast Florida is projecting a 9- to 24-inch rise by 2060, and the California State Lands Commission is preparing for a 55-inch rise by 2100.

In its draft, the commission’s science panel also suggested several planning initiatives to begin adapting to the expected watery future. It also recommended that the plan be updated every five years to incorporate the best available science and forecasts.

But once the report went public, the backlash came swiftly. NC-20, a group representing some coastal counties and development interests, questioned much of the data in the science panel’s report and the basic science underpinning climate change. It offered evidence that it said refuted the contention that sea level is currently rising. The draft plan, it feared, was the first step toward land-use regulations that would stifle economic growth in the coastal counties, and several of those counties passed resolutions opposing the plan.

In the face of such opposition, the Coastal Resources Commission asked the science panel to review the objections. It did so in an addendum that Margery Overton, the panel’s chairwoman, presented yesterday. She affirmed the panel’s original findings, but noted the uncertainty of its forecasts for future sea-level rise. If the ocean rises at the same rate that it has in the past, the debate is moot, she said.

“If you use the historical data and do the math, you don’t get a one-meter (39-inch) rise,” said Overton, an engineering professor at N.C. State University. “So the forecasts are based on the expectation that sea-level rise will accelerate in the future. Acceleration is the key.”

And it could be decades before that happens, Emory noted. “We need to get our arms around sea-level rise,” he told the commission. “I don’t think we’re at a point where rules are necessary, but we need a policy that focuses our attention on sea-level rise.”

He suggested that the commission’s Estuarine and Ocean Systems Committee fashion such a policy from the science panel’s draft. It needs to focus more on educating people and less on forecasting how high the sea might get in the future, he said.

“If there’s anything in there that we don’t need but will only draw fire, it needs to be taken out,” Emory said. “We’re not through the dialogue phase yet. We’re receiving resolutions from local governments at a fairly rapid pace. I don’t want this policy to be seen as a back-door to regulation.”

None of the other commission members suggested an alternate course.

Overton was pleased with the outcome. “I’m happy with it,” she said. “This is a very difficult problem, and we have time.”

Robert S. Young was less enthusiastic. He’s a geologist who heads the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. He’s also a member of the science panel and one of the primary authors of the addendum to the original report.

“I agree that this isn’t an emergency, but I don’t think we have 30 years to figure this out,” he said. “Nothing will get better in the next decade. Storm damage will only get worse. Beach re-nourishment projects will only get more expensive. Good planning is about preparing for the future.”

But first people have to get comfortable with the concept, Emory said. “I’m not trying to minimize what we might see 50 years from now,” he said. “But we’re not ready to discuss it yet.”

NAGS HEAD — For at least a decade, numerous North Carolina scientists have been warning with increasing stridency about the state’s vulnerability to impending sea-level rise, but policymakers have yet to take heed.

Two reports released this month by a group of independent researchers, however, have only reinforced the dire predictions about the effects of a rising Atlantic on the state’s coast.

Ben Strauss

“Our hope is, really, to provide useful information and help people prepare,” said Ben Strauss, an author of “Surging Seas,” and director of the program on sea-level rise with Climate Central, a nonprofit journalism and research organization based in Princeton, N.J. “The problem is very real. In the scientific community, the only real debate is how fast and how much.”

North Carolina, the report said, has the third-highest amount of land area in the nation that would be inundated by one meter (39 inches) or less of water. It ranks sixth in the number of houses affected and eighth in the population affected.

Of the counties in the state with the largest total population exposed to the risk, Dare County ranks No. 1.

That is hardly a surprise to Stan Riggs, an East Carolina University coastal geologist who has been studying the Outer Banks since the 1970s.

“The bottom line with sea-level rise, this has been going on for 18,000 years now,” said Riggs, whose book The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast, was also released recently.

As he has told anyone who will listen, storm damage on the Outer Banks that leaves roads torn up and houses stranded in the water is only going to increase.

“They’re in the ocean because sea level is still rising,” Riggs said. “This is fact. There’s a train coming down the tracks and it’s getting closer and closer.”

According to “Surging Seas” and a related report by the Environmental Research Letters, the best estimate for the average level of sea rise by 2030 on the Atlantic coast is six inches; by 2050, it’s 13 inches.

The Rising Sea

Hurricane Irene flooded downtown Manteo.

In North Carolina, there is a one in six chance that combined sea-level rise, storm surge and tide will exceed three feet by 2020, flooding 3.5 percent of the state’s acreage and 0.9 percent of the state’s homes.

By contrast, the chances are equal that that same amount of water would flood 65.8 percent of Dare County land, impacting 23.1 percent of the homes. In Nags Head, it would amount to 16 percent of the land and 13.7 percent of the homes; in Kitty Hawk, it would be 53.9 percent and 21.7 percent, respectively; in Hatteras, 71.6 percent and 74.6 percent; and in Ocracoke, 45.4 percent and 80.8 percent.

Dennis Stewart, a biologist with Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, said he has already seen the effects of rising seas in Alligator River, which is about two feet above sea level. Saltwater intrusion has been gradually killing off trees, he said, and canals running through refuge lands on the Dare County mainland allow salt water to “jet” farther into the interior system.  Over the years, he has seen swaths of land transitioning from pond pine pocosin to salt marsh.

Stewart said that the refuge is working with The Nature Conservancy on ways to adapt and manage for sea-level rise in Alligator River, including planting salt-tolerant trees.

In Pea Island on the north end of Hatteras Island, Stewart said he has observed “tremendous” beach erosion, even on the sound side. Left to nature, the island would be migrating west and widening the sound beach. But maintenance of N.C. 12 and dunes along the ocean side prevents that process.

“So the island is getting narrower and narrower and will continue to do that,” Stewart said. “Our game plan is to manage Pea Island pretty much as we are now.”

But it is clear that one day the ocean will blow out the dikes of each of the refuge’s three bird impoundments, he said. When that happens, whatever is left will be managed as sand flats and marsh.

Hurricane Irene in August tore an inlet through the refuge and breached N.C. 12 at the so-called “S-Curves” on the south end of the refuge. The state Department of Transportation has since restored the road and is working on long-term solutions.

Although Stewart won’t venture to guess what rate seas will rise, he doesn’t question the validity of the science.

Dennis Stewart

“I accept it,” he said. “Only time is going to tell who’s right and who’s wrong about sea-level rise. I want to err on the side of conservation.”

Riggs, on the other hand, expresses no doubt that N.C 12 does not have much of a future on Pea Island.

“Even if you hold Pea Island, the state of North Carolina does not have the money to hold those weak spots,” he said. “No matter what you do there, you’re going to have problems.”

When it comes to fighting geology and the rising ocean, Riggs is confident that sooner or later, the Outer Banks will throw in the towel on N.C.12.  In fact, if another storm like Irene came right now, he said, “we’d already be there.”

But Riggs believes the state should be proactive and plan innovative transportation systems, including high-speed ferries that would preserve the coastal economy.

“These are the most spectacular waters in the world,” he said. “People would come from all over the world to see this place. We have to figure out ways to make that happen.”

An Alternate Vision

Even if N.C. 12 was under water on Pea Island and other weak spots on Hatteras Island — areas he called “wimpy” barrier island — Riggs said the villages are less vulnerable because they’re built on higher, more stable ground.

If the road was allowed to go away, he predicted, the barrier islands would naturally rebuild — by moving like “a tank tread” — and the pollutants in Pamlico Sound would be flushed. The healthy nutrient balance would be restored, the water would become saltier, habitats for threatened species would be renewed and fishing would improve. In essence, the equilibrium of the natural system would be restored.

And if the system was left alone, the Hatteras Flats on the soundside, old flood tide deltas, would help the islands to regenerate.

“I like to think of them as the barrier island retirement system,” Riggs said.

Stan Riggs

The Outer Banks has the potential to be like Core Banks, “a very happy set of barrier islands,” that have been allowed to grow laterally.

Eventually, Riggs wrote in his book, the barrier islands could become “eight Ocracoke-style destination villages, situated like a string of pearls on a vast network of inlet and shoal environments.”

Riggs said that he has received very positive feedback from the public during his recent book tours, but he has seldom heard from any politician.

“It’s like they don’t want to know too much,” he said. “The politicians are thinking short term.”

State Report

A sea-level rise report submitted recently by a state-appointed panel of scientists to the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission has been pulled to allow time for the division to respond to critiques of the report, said Tancred Miller, the coastal policy analyst for the state Division of Coastal Management.

Much of the feedback on the report, which had projected sea-level rise between 39 to 54 inches by 2100, Miller said, came from NC-20, a lobbying group for home builders and some coastal counties. The division has posted a much watered-down draft of the report that reflects changes requested by the lobbying group.

Miller said that North Carolina has not yet established any official policy to address climate change or sea-level rise. But, he said, it is a priority with the commission, which had asked for the sea-level rise report.

“It’s a place to start,” he said, “just to get an understanding if there is a problem that we need to understand and prepare to react to.”

Other states, including Rhode Island, Maryland, Delaware, Florida, California and New York, he said, have some sort of sea-level policy or response plan.

“I think that there are a lot of states that we can look to that are taking it seriously,” Miller said.

Hurricane Irene cut two inlets in the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on Hatteras Island. Photo: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

HATTERAS — Traveling along the edge of the continent on a two-lane highway built atop a skinny strand of shifting sand just inches above two mighty bodies of water might sound adventuresome in travel guides.

The adventure can turn hazardous on a nasty day in the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge. Sand swirls in angry gusts across the road, vast pools of water — from sky, ocean, sound or all of the above — force vehicles to crawl, turn around or stall. Dunes appear to transform into living things, buffeting a pitiful strip of asphalt from monstrous waves.

But for residents of the Outer Banks, driving on the 65-miles of N.C. 12 on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands is an economic necessity and a transportation challenge. Tourism brought $834 million into Dare County in 2010, and most islanders make their living from tourist-related business.

Two severe cuts in the road in and on the south edge of the refuge inflicted by Hurricane Irene in August were the most recent illustration of the corridor’s vulnerability to beach erosion and storm damage, renewing questions about the futility of fixing such a vulnerable highway, especially in an era of a rapidly rising sea.

“The cost of maintaining Pea Island has been incredibly expensive,” said Stan Riggs, a geology professor at East Carolina University. “If the public knew how much has been spent just to hold that road, I think they’d croak.”

Dr. Stanley Riggs

Riggs has spent his professional life researching the natural dynamics of the N.C. coast. Few people know more about the coast’s geology. Riggs has written numerous books on coastal geology, including The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast. The recently published book argues that the present development and management policies for the coast’s changing barrier island are in direct conflict with their natural dynamics.

Riggs agrees that a transportation route for Hatteras Island is a necessity. But sea level rise is expected to accelerate in the future because of a changing climate, he says. That means only worse problems for N.C. 12, Riggs noted. It’s time, he said, for people to get creative.

“We need a whole new paradigm,” he said.

How High Will She Rise

Oceans rise in a warming climate. Water expands as it heats up, and melting glaciers add to the oceans’ volume.

That much scientists know. How high the sea might rise in the future and how quickly are still open to debate. That will depend largely on how much of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt.

Because of its gently sloping coastline, North Carolina is one of the most vulnerable states on the East Coast to sea-level rise, scientists say. Most current scientific estimates put the Atlantic Ocean along our shores about three feet higher than it is now by 2100. That’s about double the historic rate of sea-level rise. A panel of scientific experts that advises the state’s Coastal Resources Commission came to a similar conclusion last year in its original draft report on future sea-level rise. It concluded that the rise would be about 39 inches by 2100. Depending on how much or how little is done to address climate change, the rate could potentially be as low as 18 inches per 100 years, or as high as 55 inches.

A follow-up draft was watered down significantly after intense lobbying by development interests. The commission is awaiting a response from its scientific panel before deciding on a final report.

As policymakers ponder, the ocean continues its inexorable rise, putting that thin ribbon of asphalt known as N.C. 12 in greater jeopardy and its future in greater question.

“We’re not opposed to doing something out there,” Riggs said. “Our point is, we know what the science is.”

Along Comes Irene

Hurricane Irene chewed up N.C. 12 through Mirlo Beach. Photo: Outer Banks Voice

At one breach in Pea Island, about six miles south of Oregon Inlet, Hurricane Irene cut about 150 feet from the road, channeling surging water from ocean to sound.  Further south at Mirlo Beach, she destroyed whole sections of roadbed with a surging tide.

Riggs has long predicted that those areas, especially at Mirlo, could become new inlets, but Irene was a weak hurricane that barely kicked up wave. Even weak storms, scientist warn, can have catastrophic effects as the oceans warm and rise.

“It was all on the backside, and those inlets blew out, not in,” Riggs said. “And all that destruction was because the water couldn’t get out.”

With the blessing of Gov. Bev Perdue, the N.C. Department of Transportation went into high gear to get the road reopened to traffic. Emergency ferries transported supply vehicles, utility trucks and, eventually, some of stranded residents back and forth between Stumpy Point and Rodanthe.

Within weeks, a temporary, $2.6 million steel truss bridge was installed over the breach in Pea Island, and road workers repaired the underbed and repaved N.C. 12 at Mirlo Beach. The highway reopened Oct. 5, but DOT already has had to reinforce the new inlet’s south shore with rock and metal sheet piling to stem erosion that could have undermined the bridge.

Long-term solutions at the north end at Mirlo, where erosion is as much as 15 feet a year, include building a bridge within the easement and building a bridge that extends into the Pamlico Sound. At the Pea Island inlet, options are to build a new road or bridge west of the existing road, or build a permanent bridge where the road now stands.

Permanent fixes proposed by DOT at both sites initially included beach nourishment, either by itself or combined with bridging, But after a December meeting of state and federal agency representatives, DOT decided it was not a viable option because offshore sand sources were inadequate, it was too costly and permits would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.

At the suggestion of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manager of the refuge, DOT agreed at the December meeting to look into the feasibility of a longer, seven-mile bridge that would start north of the Pea Island breach, curve out into Pamlico Sound and tie-in at Rodanthe.

Public comment on the proposals closed in January, and DOT is expected to make a recommendation on an alternative within weeks.

Maintaining the Road

Whatever the choice, DOT remains committed to keeping the coastal thoroughfare open.

“N.C. 12 is just like any of our highways that has its own challenges,” said Victor Barbour, DOT’s technical services administrator. “But I do think from an overall perspective, we have some roads in the mountains that cost as much or more as N.C. 12 to maintain.”

According to information in the final environmental impact statement for replacing the aging Herbert C. Bonner Bridge at Oregon Inlet, DOT spent about $5.5 million to restore N.C. 12 after storms between August 1999 and October 2007. Of that, about $3.9 million was spent within the Pea Island refuge at three “hot spots, ” including at ‘S’ Curves, renowned as a premier East Coast surfing spot.  Most of the costs were related to Hurricanes Dennis, Bonnie and Floyd in 1999 ($1.7 million) and Hurricane Isabel in 2003 ($1.2 million). Over that period, there were six hurricanes, one tropical storm and 13 nor’easters that required clean-ups.But Barbour agreed that maintenance of N.C. 12 is more expensive than an average road. Over the last 10 years, he said, DOT has spent $100 million maintaining 120 miles of N.C. 12 stretching from Corolla to Ocracoke. Although the cost has not been broken out per mile, there’s no doubt that the vast majority of work is concentrated south of Oregon Inlet. So far, Barbour said, Hurricane Irene damage has cost $12 million, much of it paid by federal emergency funds.

Pea Island, the Bonner Bridge

Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge has some of the most pristine beaches on Outer Banks. Not only do residents love to go there, it attracts about 3 million visitors per year.  But it’s not a substantial land— just 13 miles long, the refuge is at its widest only one mile east to west. At its narrowest, it is just a quarter mile across.

In the old days, the ebb and flow of the tide was unrestricted. Now, Riggs said, “the whole system is in danger of being blown out.”

Crumbling supports at the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge.

Environmental groups and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which runs the refuge, favored a 17.5-mile bridge to replace the aging Herbert C. Bonner Bridge over Oregon Inlet that would have bypassed Pea Island and its troublesome hot spots. DOT took the proposal off the table because of its high upfront cost and access issues. Construction of the new bridge just west of the existing one is scheduled to begin in early 2013.

Dennis Stewart, a refuge biologist who is a member of a N.C. 12 coastal scientist panel that has advised DOT, said that Fish and Wildlife is working cooperatively with DOT to find mutually acceptable fixes to N.C. 12. Although Mirlo is mostly outside of the refuge, the hot spot area stretches from ‘S-Curves’ on the south end of the refuge into Rodanthe.

Stewart said he has seen Pea Island narrow over the years. When he first started in 1994, N.C. 12 was located east of a ranger’s building, a 40-vehicle parking lot was east of the highway and a double dune line was east of the lot. All that’s gone now, he said.

The water that came rushing back toward the sound shoreline when Irene passed turned out to be a powerful punch at a weak spot.

“It was almost like a tsunami,” Stewart said.  “Hurricane Irene totally convinced me that it’s a fragile system.”

As a coastal engineer with North Carolina Sea Grant, Spencer Rogers —who is also a member of the N.C. 12 coastal panel — said that despite the overall success of road relocation in the past, Fish and Wildlife will no longer permit that remedy. Another challenge to maintaining the corridor in the future, he said, is the near-impossibility of fixing the road within the 100-foot state right of way, as required by the refuge.

Andrew Coburn, associate director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, said that it all boils down to allocation of sparse resources

“If there’s an unlimited amount of sand and an unlimited amount of money, absolutely you can keep a road open there,” he said. “If you had unlimited resources, you probably wouldn’t have had a breach. But you’d have to deal with the potential environmental impacts of what you did to maintain that road.

“It’s tough,” Coburn said. “It’s almost an impossible situation to be in.”

Riggs, convinced that there will be little other option in the not -too-distant future, supports use of high-tech ferries – an idea that  is anathema to Dare County and one DOT says would be impractical– combined with things like water taxis or float planes that have been used successfully in other coastal regions.

“Right now, we’ve survived just out of sheer luck,” Riggs said “The next big storm is going to be a catastrophe.”

Coming in March: What will the Outer Banks look like?