Land's end: as the shoreline creeps closer, coastal leaders debate the need for bold action or quiet restraint.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Cover story

Choppy Bogue Sound spatters the boat's windshield as dark clouds gather in the west. "The sea breezes will hold it back awhile," Todd Miller says. Now 57, he grew up a few miles from here in the mainland community of Ocean. He steers alongside uninhabited Long Island, slowing down as his Yamaha outboard sounds a shallow-water warning. "We'd come over here in the winter, get oysters and cook them on a fire. Then you had to face that cold north wind going home."

An elderly couple with a cooler and lawn chairs, their two dogs splashing behind, wade from their anchored boat to the narrow sliver of sand. Porpoises whoosh through their blowholes nearby. It's a postcard setting, hard to picture as a battleground. "This won't be here in another 30 years," says Miller, founder of the 10,000-member North Carolina Coastal Federation, an Ocean-based nonprofit that promotes environmental protection. "See the erosion? And these trees are already dying because of saltwater encroachment."

A consensus of scientists and oceanographers say the sea is inexorably rising and likely to cover as much as 2,000 square miles of coastal North Carolina this century. How the state should respond has sparked an intense debate. On one side are politicians and business groups who dispute the scientists' warnings and want to preserve the region's growth prospects. On the other are environmentalists who oppose development in places facing a rising sea. Both camps agree that, with nearly 6,000 miles of tidal and estuarine shoreline and more than 300 miles of oceanfront, North Carolina has much at stake. It's an issue of more than dollars and science. For those whose ancestors waded ashore centuries ago as well as those who have settled here since, permanently or in vacation homes or to build a business, it's personal.

Formal warning flags began unfurling a decade ago when Democrats led by Gov. Mike Easley, a former Southport prosecutor, and Senate Pro Tern Marc Basnight, a Manteo restaurateur, ruled Raleigh. In 2005, the General Assembly created the Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change. Its 34 members included legislators, academics and environmentalists, along with several business people and representatives of trade associations. The group's final report, in 2010, divined dire consequences. It urged the legislature to crack down on seawalls and other measures that sustain development and direct local governments to calculate how badly tax revenue would be dampened if water inundated homes. Put detailed maps of sea-level rise on the Internet, it urged, so everyone could see what the future might look like.

If you believe the scientists, it isn't a pretty picture. Property losses related to a 32-inch sea level rise in just four coastal counties--New Hanover, Bertie, Carteret and Dare--would be $6.9 billion in today's dollars, according to a 2007 report by economists and climate researchers at East Carolina, UNC Wilmington, Duke and Appalachian State universities. Recreation-related losses in Brunswick, Pender, Onslow and Carteret would amount to $4 billion or more, and business-interruption, agricultural and forestry losses in New Hanover, Dare, Carteret and Bertie, from higher sea level and increasingly destructive hurricanes, would total $2 billion to $3 billion. "I'm more worried now than I was then," says Chris Dumas, a UNC Wilmington economics professor and one of the authors. "There's more evidence every year."

Another report in 2010--this one from the Science Panel on Coastal Hazards, appointed by the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resource's Coastal Resources Commission--concluded there is "indisputable evidence that sea level has been steadily rising in North Carolina." The 13-member panel predicted a likely increase of 1 meter--about 39 inches--this century and urged the state to improve its monitoring by adding gauges and reassessing its forecasts every five years or so. If sea level rises a meter, 230,000 homes and businesses would be imperiled. That would affect more than a half-million people, based on current census data and enrollment in state and federal wind- and flood-insurance programs. Agricultural and tourism businesses would face the biggest losses.

That same year, a political sea change swept the state: Tar Heel Republicans captured both the state House and Senate for the first time in more than a century. In 2012, they increased their majorities and Pat McCrory, who expressed doubts about man-made climate change during his campaign, won the governor's race. Almost overnight, the issue of sea-level rise--long synonymous with concerns over "global warming"--turned into a toxic political topic. A similar reversal occurred in Florida, where Republican Gov. Rick Scott and the state's GOP-dominated legislature is pushing to unwind climate-change initiatives approved by Democratic predecessors. Engineers at the N.C. Department of Transportation have revised plans for a widening of U.S. 64 near the Albemarle Sound in Tyrrell and...