It’s hard to keep pace with all the ways the climate cult blames naturally occurring phenomena on “climate change,” be it natural disasters, violent storms, or “record” temperatures. While the weather is not getting “more extreme” as the climatistas claim, their apocalyptic rhetoric certainly is, and it’s also getting more dishonest. The conflation of shifting sands on barrier islands with rising sea levels is another scientifically dishonest claim being made by the climate alarmists.

Back in the 1980s, the first generation of global warmists promised that a catastrophic rise in sea levels was likely to submerge the Maldives, among other coastal areas, before 2020. Not only did that never happen, but the Maldives has a greater landmass now than it did when its imminent submersion was a “scientific fact” three decades ago. So, with the oceans not cooperating in rising as prophesied by “climate scientists” 30-plus years ago, the climate hysterics and the credulous media are now blaming the naturally occurring movement of barrier islands on "climate change" and rising seas.

Whenever a beach house on a barrier island is lost to shifting sands, it is now being reported as a harbinger of the coastal doom that is being caused by our carbon sinning. Just a few weeks ago, the American media was somberly reporting about yet another house on North Carolina’s Outer Banks being lost to the rising waters of the Atlantic Ocean. From an AP story dated 5/29/2024:

Another house has collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean along North Carolina’s coast, the sixth to fall along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore’s beaches in the past four years, according to U.S. National Park Service officials. North Carolina’s coast is almost entirely made up of narrow, low-lying barrier islands that are increasingly vulnerable to storm surges and to being washed over from both the bay and the sea as the planet warms. As sea levels rise, these islands typically move toward the mainland, frustrating efforts to hold properties in place.