Legislating Science

It seems that in North Carolina that some legislators think that science can be made by rule of law. These members of the legislator don’t like some of the estimates of sea level rise that have been put forward for the rest of this century. So they have decided they they can dictate through the law how those projected levels should be measured. A copy of the draft bill can be found here. Published descriptions can be found here. It seems to me that is what the state hires good employees with solid training in science and data analysis to do.

The key part of the bill is in section 2(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.

So for planning purposes they have decided that linear extrapolation is the way to go. Nature may not agree with them. And at this point the scientific evidence does not agree with them. Methods of estimation should not be determined by legislative fiat. Rarely do things in science actually behave in a linear fashion. Perhaps they should estimate the temperature in Raleigh next January using linear extrapolation base on data for January and May of this year. If so then someone needs to buy some good air conditioners. Or they can forget about Hurricane preparedness for this summer as it is extremely unlikely that any hurricane will have a linear trajectory toward the North Carolina coast during the first few day after formation.

This is not an issue of global warming. It is an issue of science. If linear extrapolation works, use it. If the exponential extrapolation is the best model then use it. If the models give an estimate that is less than that given by linear extrapolation then use that estimate. But to assume that linear extrapolation is the way to go, and to codify that in the law is foolishness.