More on that whole North Carolina coast – climate denial – ignore the future tragedy:

The approaching storm almost certainly gained destructive power from a warming climate, but a 2012 law, and subsequent actions by the state, effectively ordered state and local agencies that develop coastal policies to ignore scientific models showing an acceleration in the rise of sea levels.

In the years since, development has continued with little regard to the long-term threat posed by rising sea levels. And the coastal region’s population and economy have boomed, growing by almost half in the last 20 years.

In other words state law has put a large number of people in harm’s way, because of pure obstinate fingers-in-ears Denial.

Business leaders had been jolted by a state commission’s 2010 report saying that sea levels could rise as much as 39 inches by the year 2100, which would devastate the coast and swamp billions of dollars’ worth of real estate.

What do you do when you’re jolted by information about future events? If you’re at least a little bit reality-based you do your best to figure out what’s the best course of action to deal with those events and then follow that course of action. If not, you just close your eyes hard and Deny.

Before the Republicans gained the upper hand, North Carolina was “a leader in really thoughtful coastal management,” said Geoffrey R. Gisler, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

But the commission’s 2010 report about sea level threw a scare into real estate developers, as well as some coastal residents, who worried that the state would respond with new policies that would crimp their profits or their way of life.

“A lot of folks who have interests in developing areas that are currently vulnerable, and would become more vulnerable with sea level rise, objected to the public finding out that there was this projected significant sea-level rise,” Mr. Gisler said. “And so the legislature decided to prohibit looking that far out.”

In other words, because some real estate developers wanted to make a lot of $$$ selling property on a low-lying coast, the state government lied about what is going to happen to that low-lying coast as the sea levels rise. Republican values in a nutshell.

North Carolina was not alone in turning away from the direr warnings of climate science. The administration of Gov. Rick Scott of Florida discouraged the use of terms like “climate change” and “global warming” in official communications.

President Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and some federal agencies have played down terms like “climate change” in their reports, publications and websites. But the Trump administration’s actions go beyond just words: it is attempting to roll back dozens of environmental and climate regulations.

Michael Mann, a climate change expert at Pennsylvania State University whose work has shown the links between greenhouse gas emissions and sharply rising temperatures, said that the administration’s policies, including a recently revealed effort to relax Obama-era restrictions on energy companies’ release of methane into the atmosphere, will accelerate climate change.

Yes but that’s tomorrow. Today is all that counts.