Outlawing sea-level rise?

A new bill in North Carolina (http://www.care2.com/causes/nc-ignores-science-tries-to-make-sea-level-rise-illegal.html) takes science denial to a new level--or rather, a new low. HB 819 (http://www.nccoast.org/uploads/documents/CRO/2012-5/SLR-bill.pdf) restricts which state scientists may address sea level change and restricts the methods state scientists may use in determining such future sea level rise.


Section A announces that:

(a) No State agency, board, commission, institution, or other public entity thereof shall adopt any rule, policy, or planning guideline addressing sea-level rise, unless authorized to do do under this Article.

Are geology professors at a public university considered part of a "public entity"? Then conceivably, they could violate the law by discussing guidelines to address sea level rise. 

Section E is even more onerous: 

(e) The Division of Coastal Management shall be the only State agency authorized to develop rates of sea-level rise and shall do so only at the request of the Commission. These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates 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. 

"Historical data" is a strange limitation to the methods scientists use. What HB 819 attempts to do here is banish computer modeling, which is one of the effective tools scientists have to understand and predict what may happen in the future.

To see why this is so silly, imagine that a bill on airline safety restricted aeronautical engineers to using only "historical data" to assess airplane safety. New plane designs are often tested using computer modeling; this technique is very useful to engineers. But now this new anti-modeling law forbids engineers from using computer to assess safety; they can only rely on past accidents. However, those past accidents involve old designs that may not be relevant to the modern issues. 

This is the dilemma here for climate scientists; the historical record involves climate in a cooler world, with far less CO2 than today, and hence the past may not necessarily be an indicator of future climate behavior. 

Even worse are the restrictions on using data only after the year 1900. Why 1900? Well, for one thing, this cuts out a much longer record over geologic time. In general, the more data you can assemble, the better you can judge what is happening. The decades after 1900 are a small snapshot of processes that occur over much longer time periods. What we really want to use are data sets such as the Vostok ice core data--but HB 819 artificially forbids such data. 

Stranger still, HB 819 forbids scientists from using "scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise." Why? This is a bizarre restriction that usurps the judgment of professional scientist with the political machinations of politicians. This gross example of science denialism is a glimpse into an alternate reality where scientific truth can be manifested by legislation.