Editor, Gazette-Journal:

An article on the front page of your most recent edition of the Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal, citing a VIMS study, warns of sea level rise and exhorts the state to act quickly to counter it. While it is true that the sea level is slowly rising and the Tidewater area is subsiding, it has been doing so for a very long time. Whether one believes that it is the result of man-caused global warming or from natural solar cycles; if one believes that it is rising one foot or three by year 2100, it really doesn’t matter. Nothing Gloucester or Mathews can do will stop it. So what is to be done?

Although the article does not propose specific countermeasures, it does note several that have been tried in various parts of the world and some that have not yet been. The one thing they all share is that they are expensive—the kind of expensive that could bankrupt our counties and put significant financial burden on the Commonwealth.

As the waters rise,...