Hot on the heels of Amendment One, North Carolina is on a roll as it moves from marriages to measurements as it tries to make part of science itself illegal by regulating how we measure. A blog post for Scientific American describes NC's latest attempt to legislate reality away.
In this blog by Scott Huler for Scientific American, North Carolina's coastal cities are apparently having difficulty with current predictions of rising sea levels. The solution? Make any measurements that are too high illegal.
“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 seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly. …” It goes on, but there’s the core: North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises.
This makes me wonder, when the sea level does rise higher than the legal amount - will getting your feet wet be next on the list of illegal activities, or will it only be illegal to notice that your toes are damp?