Save Nonlinearities in North Carolina!

Join the fight to save nonlinearities in North Carolina! [Yes, really.]

Apparently, in an effort to combat the exponential rise in sea levels and the risk of coastal flooding, North Carolina legislators have decided that only linear extrapolation can be used to measure the rise in sea level.

Or, as the new law puts it: "These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly."

As the writer of the article to which I link puts it, "North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises."

Should I laugh to keep from crying now? Hell, I was trained as a nonlinear scientist---am I not allowed in North Carolina anymore?

Next thing you know, some state legislature will try to say that π must be approximated as 3.

(Tip of the cap to Karen Daniels.)