Societal Responses to Regional Climatic Change: Forecasting by Analogy by Michael H Glantz

Author:Michael H Glantz [Glantz, Michael H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000312065
Google: yAeiDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49789400
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Recent Perceptions and Responses

The Sea-level Rise Forum in Charleston

In the early 1980s, popular media coverage of a global warming was still sporadic. In South Carolina, there was minimal awareness and discussion of this issue outside the academic community. However, EPA initiated studies of the potential physical and economic impacts of sea-level rise on Charleston, South Carolina, and Galveston, Texas, and then convened a national conference in Washington, DC, in March 1983, where these studies were presented.

Subsequently, a symposium on sea-level rise was held in Charleston during February 1984. This symposium featured a diversity of speakers from federal and state resource agencies, local government, and local economic development and real estate interests. There was advance publicity, and the meeting was attended by more than 100 people, many of whom had little prior awareness of global warming and sea-level rise.

Shortly before the meeting, there was considerable pressure by local development interests upon the local sponsors to cancel the meeting. Their concerns were based on apprehensions that highlighting the EPA case study would have a profound negative impact on residential and commercial development in the area.

During the course of the meeting itself, local public and private interests demonstrated the strongest resistance to being concerned about impacts associated with sea-level rise. In contrast, the representative from the state's coastal management agency (South Carolina Coastal Council) demonstrated the greatest reflection about sea-level rise effects and potential responses. Nonetheless, the general consensus of most local officials at that meeting was that the possibility and range of impacts from sea-level rise was too vague and too remote to affect any near-term planning (unpublished transcript of symposium, South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium).

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