Fact ? Or Fiction ?

Residents on the New South Wales Central coast are alarmed that Gosford Council is proposing to "sterilise " their homes by imposing restrictions they claim are necessary because of rising sea levels. They will simply draw "danger zones " on maps and refuse building permits - or even allow existing homes to be renovated, and many with beach outlooks carry a five million dollar price tag.

The problem is inconsistency. Gosford bases it's action plan on an assumption that sea levels will rise by 40 cm by 2050 - and 90 cm by the end of this century.   Other councils up and down the coastline expect more moderate rises in sea levels and the respected  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a modest 25 cm rise.

The only inescapable fact is that there will be some sort of rise in sea levels, but the exact nature is impossible to predict.  The worst ecology zealots are spreading alarm and our best scientists are divided in their predictions.  It certainly seems premature to virtually reduce the value of people's homes to near zero by enacting draconian legislation on the basis of a worst case scenario.

In the Gosford area more than four thousand home owners will find themselves stuck in a time warp if this goes ahead.   Those who purchased recently and have a long mortgage repayment will face an impossible situation.  It would be inevitable that values would drop precipitously.  By a stroke of the pen, the council would impose financial ruin on many.

It also seems to show a defeatist attitude.   There seems to be an assumption that low lying land will not be protected - and that flies in the face with what has been done in Holland.  More than half the entire country is below sea level and the Dutch have lived with that problem - successfully - for hundreds of years.

One of the encouraging things about global warming is the fact that it is incremental.  We are not going to wake up one morning and find the tide has swallowed half the country.  Our best minds are going to be applied to building the necessary defences and it is not impossible to predict that global warming may be reversed.   Planet earth suffered several ice ages and we are well aware that when volcanoes go on the rampage the particles they emit pollute the atmosphere and filter the heat of the sun across the entire world.   Some sort of artificial shield of that nature may be within the reach of science.

The very nature of rising sea levels is something that will eventually have to be tackled at a national level - if the worst case scenario proves to be correct.   It is quite possible that the city of Sydney could become a number of densely populated islands with all of the lower level suburbs under water. We might even be forced to abandon this city - and start again at a much higher level.   That is a problem that may never arise - and if it does - it will concern the people and their government at that time.

There is danger in allowing individual councils to implement action plans based on their own interpretations of coming events.  This reeks of inconsistency and surely if hardship is to be imposed it should apply at the national level.   At this stage, science has not produced the smoking gun evidence of what sort of future we face to conclusively convince the population to accept draconian legislation that will drastically change the lives and fortunes of the multitude.