Just over a decade ago, we posted about how legislators in North Carolina passed a law that banned the state from basing coastal policies on the latest scientific predictions of how much the sea level will rise. The law required government planning boards to only use predictions of sea level rise based on linear projections from 1900.  The increased rise in sea-level due to climate change would not only be ignored but would be illegal for land use planning.

At the time, we compared their obdurate denial of climate change to Xerxes the Great ordering the sea to be flogged with chains when a storm destroyed a bridge across the Hellespont in 480 BCE,

It now looks like we were right. North Carolina’s law has proven no more effective in addressing sea level rise than Xerxes’ thalassian flogging. The Star News Online reports that new research shows that the sea level along the North Carolina coast is rising faster than in most other parts of the United States, and faster than what most scientists had expected.

“It’s very worrisome,” said Dr. Phil Bresnahan, an oceanographer at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. “I don’t think there’s any way around that conclusion.”

A recent study led by researchers from Tulane University found sea rise along the U.S. Southeast and Gulf coasts have reached record-breaking levels over the past 12 years.

The study, published late last month in the journal Nature Communications, found that researchers had detected rates of sea-level rise of about 0.5 inches a year since 2010. While that might not sound like a lot, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says average sea level has risen by 0.14 inches since the early 1990s.

“These rapid rates are unprecedented over at least the 20th century and they have been three times higher than the global average over the same period,” said Dr. Sönke Dangendorf, one of the study’s lead researchers and an assistant professor at Tulane, in a university release.

The impact of climate change on the oceans was reinforced by the World Meteorological Organization, which said global sea levels are rising at more than double the pace they did during the first decade of measurements from 1993 to 2002, and hit a new record high last year.