Lefties using bully tactics to stack state environmental panel?

It’s pretty obvious that lefties are having a hard time with the GOP running things in Raleigh.  We’ve got a sloppy-fat, jheri-curled “preacher” and the Phish fan club banging pots and pans and hollering in the legislative building.  We’ve got leftist groups bogging down McCrory administration agencies with document requests and lawsuits.  

Now, it appears lefties are ready to rumble in order to protect their stranglehold on the formulation of state environmental policy.  Lefties have tried to dramatically curtail and regulate coastal development — alleging that a dramatic rise in the ocean level is eminent.  In 2012, the legislature directed the Coastal Resource Commission to come up with a revised sea level prediction by March 2015.  An advisory panel was to be set up to assist with this effort.  THAT is where the trouble apparently began.

The new powers-that-be have attempted to appoint folks to this sea-rise panel that don’t necessarily drink the Al Gore “sky-is-falling” kool aid. Lefties were not amused:

Climate deniers could soon overtake a North Carolina commission created to study the effects of sea level rise. The nominations are only the latest blow from conservatives that have done their best to make climate change seem inconsequential to the coastal state. In the process, the Republican-controlled legislature managed to bury a key projection of the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission panel: The state’s shores will face more than three feet of sea level rise within the next century.

Larry Baldwin, a current member of the Coastal Resources Commission, wants to nominate climate deniers to fill the science panel’s vacancies, since he is one himself. Some of Baldwin’s top picks are Nicola Scafetta, David Burton, and Robert Brown. Scafetta, a researcher with the Duke University Physics Department, thinks anthropogenic warming is “significantly overstated.” Burton, who has made a “hobby” out of “the study of the science of sea-level rise,” thinks the panel is “outside their area of expertise, really, when it comes to that topic.” And Brown once argued in a blog post against preparing for sea level rise: “Yet we are asked to spend money and time now, when there literally isn’t a hint of a problem in the … empirical data.”

Once considered a scientific panel, the commission has moved in a more conservative and industry-friendly direction ever since the North Carolina legislature removed many of the actual scientists.

So, if you don’t worship the gospel of AlGore, you aren’t a scientist?  (By the way, what are Gore’s scientific credentials?) MORE: 

In 2013, Gov. Pat McCrory appointed Frank Gorham, a man whose day job is overseeing his oil and gas investment company and who thinks no scientist “is smart enough to say [sea level] is going to rise 39 inches.”

The panel’s three-foot-rise projection offended the Republican legislature enough in 2012 that it voted officially to ignore it. Hoping to avoid a repeat, the panel will now only look at sea level 30 years into the future. North Carolina’s war on science hasn’t ended there, either. There was another incident where the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources was caught deleting public resources about climate change. […]

Lefties like to tout freedom of speech and the concept of open debate.  But try to question their spin, and they pick up their marbles and go home — verbally abusing you the whole time:

The chairman of the state’s commission that sets coastal development policy deftly defused what could have been the next explosive issue in the politically charged sea-level rise debate by appointing a respected geologist to the commission’s panel of science advisers while passing on nominees who have publicly questioned either the scientific validity of climate change or that seas would rise as a result.

“I really wanted the CRC to be respected,” Frank Gorham, the chairman of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, said yesterday after making the appointment. “The way to do that is to respect the process and to respect the current Science Panel. I don’t agree with some of the personal views of some of the panel members but I respect their credentials.”

FYI — Gorham, who gave Pat McCrory’s campaign $8000, is a McCrory appointee. MORE: 

[…]

In this charged atmosphere, CRC and Science Panel members nominated 14 people to fill the four vacancies or to become so-called “ad-hoc” members who would assist the panel in devising the new report. Many on the list are noted marine geologists or coastal engineers. Some, though, have no apparent expertise in coastal geology or engineering or in climate science but are frequent contributors to web sites that question various aspects of climate change or have close ties to groups that fiercely opposed the original sea-level report.

Gorham avoided them and appointed Greg “Rudi” Rudolph, a geologist who heads Carteret County’s Shore Protection Office, to the Science Panel. The three other spots should remain vacant until the panel completes its report, Gorham told his Executive Committee yesterday. He said he saw no need to appoint the ad-hoc members.

“I believe with pretty good certainty that we have all the expertise we need on the panel to produce a good report,” Gorham told the committee.

The committee members agreed with their chairman’s assessment and offered no objections.

 Some of the nominees clearly had agendas, Gorham said after the meeting, and he wanted to avoid the media circus that would have surely evolved had any of them been appointed. Gorham would have also likely faced a mutiny by the scientists currently on the panel. Many said they would quit if any of the nominees with credentials they considered questionable were chosen.

Gorham heard the grumblings, but he said they didn’t affect his decision. “I really didn’t do this to avoid a mutiny,” he said. “This was done to respect the CRC and the Science Panel. I want to be known as trying to be fair and to have respect for people’s opinions and the process.”

Science is all about debate and discussion.  For the longest time, the western world thought the Earth was flat.  Until the first landing on the Moon, many scientists seriously thought the Moon’s surface was not solid — almost like quicksand.

We’ve got a chance to inject some common sense into state environmental policy but this McCrory appointee is apparently letting the enviro-nazis maintain their stranglehold on the debate.