Hey, Senator Inhofe, could we interest you in a nice vacation home on (what's left of) Holland Island?

If Senator Inhofe has the requisite wet-weather gear, he can move right in! Or maybe not -- the photo was taken Thursday.

"In a July 28, 2003, Senate speech, Inhofe stated, 'I have offered compelling evidence that catastrophic global warming is a hoax. That conclusion is supported by the painstaking work of the nation's top climate scientists.'"

-- from the Wikipedia entry for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK)

by Ken

While there seems general agreement that the house of Congress much likelier to fall into the control of the coalition of crackpots and crooks that is Today's Republican Party is the House, not the Senate, it's the Senate I flashed to as I read a little pre-Halloween horror story in today's Washington Post, about the already-happened breakup, and soon-to-happen (if it hasn't already) disappearance under the waters of Chesapeake Bay, of the house pictured above -- the last remaining house on Holland one of the last even vaguely inhabited islands in the bay, the subject of a report ("Last house on sinking Chesapeake Bay island collapses") by David A. Fahrenthold in today's Washington Post.

The reason I'm flashing to the Senate is, to name names, the all-too-vivid memory of the all-too-recent and all-too-terrifying stewardship, by James Inhofe (R-OK), of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee -- of which he remains ranking minority member. He is, in a word, a crackpot -- one of the craziest as well as most corrupt (a total tool of the energy industries) public officials on the planet, and possibly the worst-informed on environmental matters.

Presumably Senator Inhofe stands ready to resume the chairmanship anytime his party retakes control of the Senate. And even assuming the Dems manage to prevent that from happening in '10, with a generous assist from Christine O'Donnell, I gather that the list of Senate seats they have to defend in '12 is pretty scarifying. For the record, the last time I wrote at length about this lunatic felon was in a July 2009 post: "Would you believe that scientists looking into Jim Inhofe's bogus global-warming 'Minority Report' find it 'not credible'?"

The thing about Holland Island is that, as Fahrenthold informs us, it's disappearing in Chesapeake Bay, in part because of the dramatic rise in sea levels caused by the climate change that Jim Inhofe insists is a scam.

Oh, there's more left to Holland Island than you might guess from the above photo. That last remaining house on the island, you see, is on the on lowest-lying end of an island that was once three miles long and home to some 360 residents. You can see what's left of the island from some of the other photos in the photo gallery on the WaPo website, which includes some old shots of what the place once looked like.

Here's how the island looked in 2006, when old Chesapeake hand Tom Horton, author of An Island Out of Time: a Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake and Turning the Tide: Saving the Chesapeake, wrote about revisiting Holland, which he had first seen nearly half a century earlier when he moved onto nearby Smith Island for Chesapeake magazine.)

After their heyday in the late 1800s, island villages began to wink out. James Island was abandoned about 1910, Barren Island about 1916. The Holland Islanders left about 1920, and most of the houses went with them, disassembled, put on boats, and reassembled in Eastern Shore towns such as Cambridge and Crisfield.

This house stayed behind.

That last house was built, reporter Fahrenthold tells us, around 1888, and was one of about 60 houses on the island.

At the time, the bay was dotted with inhabited islands, where people farmed or watermen sailed out to dredge oysters.

Holland Island was one of the largest: Historians say it had more than 360 people around 1910, with two stores, a school and a baseball team that traveled to other islands by boat.

The house and much of what was left of the island was owned from 1995 until this past summer by onetime Methodist minister Stephen White, who expended all his resources in a futile effort to rescue the property from the bay. Now 80, he sold it after being diagnosed with hemolytic anemia, for which he's still undergoing chemotherapy. and guilt-ridden but finally resigned to the hopelessness of the undertaking.

Clearly the downfall of the Chesapeake islands, estimated to have been settled as far back as the early 1700s, has been in motion for a while. For one thing, being made of silt and clay rather than rock, they're wide-open targets for erosion by the swirling waters of the bay, with an especially high toll taken by fierce storms that find their way into the bay -- 2003's Hurricane Isabel is remembered especially unfondly. What's more, it seems the area has been sinking for some time.

The land here has been slowly sinking for thousands of years, settling itself from bulges created by the weight of Ice Age glaciers. The weight of glaciers to the north pushed the Earth's crust down, and the crust in this area went up like the other end of a see-saw. Now, the whole region is slowly sinking again.

Which is one reason why scientists say "sea levels in the Chesapeake are rising faster than they are in some other coastal regions of the United States."

The other reason is modern: climate change. The Earth's oceans are rising, scientists say, because polar ice is melting, and because warmer water expands. They have noticed the effect of climate change more in the past couple of decades, government scientists say.

One of Inhofe's most vocal critics, Dr. Steven Best, who calls the senator an "eco-barbarian," wrote in an extended 2006 survey of Inhofe's career: "To appease a handful of large energy and oil companies, Bush, Inhofe, and others in government have mortgaged the future of life on this planet."

Of course if you're Jim Inhofe, climate change can't be the cause, 'cause all this global-warming hooey is a leftist hoax. In the matter of rising ocean levels, it's well to remember that Oklahomans are pretty well removed from any ocean, and apparently -- at least in some cases -- from any sanity or reason or actual information.

For that matter, it's not clear whether the senator believes in all this stuff about Ice Age glaciers. You see, he gets all his science from the Bible. Except when he's listening to "top climate scientists" who are in reality bought-off whores of the industries that profit from environmental ravaging. (There's a fine, ragged line between Inhofe the crackpot and Inhofe the crook.)

Last Thursday a delegation from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which bought the Holland Island property from Stephen White, visited their holding, and found it as we see it above.

"It just kind of hit me. For the last 35 years, I've been using that house as a landmark," Don Baugh, a vice president at the bay foundation, said as the boat approached. "That's pretty damn sad. That's the end of an era."

However, reporter Fahrenthold writes, "It definitely won't be the end of the Chesapeake's erosion problems."

A few miles away, a watermen's community on Smith Island is just a few inches above the waves. And Maryland is contemplating how to, in one official's words, "facilitate abandonment and retreat" when faster-rising waters eventually threaten towns on the Eastern Shore's mainland.

While Oklahoma's ocean shores seem to be holding up okay, let's hope the Marylanders -- or anyone else who resides or even occasionally visits -- the real world don't need help anytime soon from a Republican-controlled Senate environment committee.

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