NORTH CAROLINA: WE LEGISLATE MORALITY AND SCIENCE

[defrog]

Yr Atavistic Science headline of the day:



io9 sums up the story nicely:

Faced with predictions that sea levels in the coastal areas of North Carolina will rise by a meter in the next century, legislators are considering bold action: making those predictions illegal. A bill being circulated in the Tarheel state would force scientists to estimate future sea levels on a linear path based on trends since 1900 — in other words, based on the simple assumption that trends always move in a straight line, no matter what.

All of this is because a coastal economic development group called NC-20 claims the report is flawed because it includes climate change science. If it used only the linear-path method, the sea rise level would be much lower – which would be much more convenient for their coastal development plans. State Republicans agree, and are keen to help out.

See what they did there?

Scientific American has a pretty good rant about it here, and I can’t add anything except to say that when yr resorting to making certain scientific methods illegal for blatantly obvious reasons of economic convenience, you’ve pretty much lost the argument about climate change.

According to my calculations,

This is dF