Climate change is making severe storms both more common and more intense.

First the river rose in Texas. Then, the rains fell hard over North Carolina, New Mexico and Illinois.

In less than a week, there were at least four 1-in-1,000-year rainfall events across the United States — intense deluges that are thought to have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.

“Any one of these intense rainfall events has a low chance of occurring in a given year,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at the nonprofit organization Climate Central, “so to see events that are historic and record-breaking in multiple parts of the country over the course of one week is even more alarming.”

It’s the kind of statistic, several experts said, that is both eye-opening and likely to become more common because of climate change.

  • Gammelfisch@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    7 days ago

    The stupid fucks had every chance to build a flood alert system. They refused because they did not want to be bought by the Democrats. Well, the dumb bastards fucking found out and they will not learn.

  • Lembot_0004@discuss.online
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    85
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    9 days ago

    Trump: See how it is? Even the best storms are in the USA now! Make Rains Great Again. Glory to the beautiful me!

      • ThePantser@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        27
        ·
        9 days ago

        He already was blaming the Texas floods on Biden. The all powerful Biden, causing all kinds of trouble 7 months after he left office. Trump wishes he had power like that.

        • chingadera@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          8 days ago

          Unfortunately he does. The aftermath of this regime will take a minimum of 50 years to fix, if it can be.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        8 days ago

        Marjorie Trailerpark Greene is literally advancing a bill to ban chemtrails.

        A thing that does not exist nor happen at any kind of scale whatsoever, beyond very, very limited and occasional scientific tests… decades ago, and were funded via programs and grants the Big Bullshit Bill and other Trump EOs have decimated.

        They do, literally, unironically, blame made up, magic, conspiracy nonsense instead of even attempting to agree with the vast, vast, vaaaaast majority of climate scientists, and even corpo scientists that work for fossil fuel companies that broadly predicted all this would happen roughly 30 years before public science caught up with it (thanks to the lobbying and propoganda campaigns of the same fossil fuel corps.)

        They will do literally anything other than admit that they are wrong, their understanding of the world is objectively delusional.

        They’re too good at magic sky daddy logic.

    • abrake@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      8 days ago

      Anyone remember this classic line from Trump 1.0 about hurricane Florence?

      This is a tough hurricane, one of the wettest we’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    72
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    9 days ago

    This is gonna create some real bad problems for building codes. Lots of stuff is designed with statistical probabilities in mind, where they account for varying levels of rare extreme weather events. If the 1 in 100 years storm becomes a 1 in 10 years storm, then lots of stuff will be in trouble.

  • yucandu@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    51
    ·
    8 days ago

    Fun fact, the reason we all call it “climate change” and not “global warming” was because the George W Bush administration directed NASA to do so, as they deemed it less “scary” to the public:

    In interviews, Republican politicians and their aides said they agreed with the strategist, Frank Luntz, that it was important to pay attention to what his memorandum, written before the November elections, called ‘‘the environmental communications battle.’’

    In his memorandum, Mr. Luntz urges that the term ‘‘climate change’’ be used instead of ‘‘global warming,’’ because ‘‘while global warming has catastrophic communications attached to it, climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge.’’

    Also, he wrote, ‘‘conservationist’’ conveys a ‘‘moderate, reasoned, common sense position’’ while ‘‘environmentalist’’ has the ‘‘connotation of extremism.’’

    President Bush’s speeches on the environment show that the terms ‘‘global warming’’ and ‘‘environmentalist’’ had largely disappeared by late last summer. The terms appeared in a number of President Bush’s speeches in 2001, but now the White House fairly consistently uses ‘‘climate change’’ and ‘‘conservationist.’’

    https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/us/a-call-for-softer-greener-language.html

    What drives me insane is how everyone on the left just… went along with it. Now we retroactively rewrite history and claim that they were always separate terms with entirely different distinct meanings. And knowing that so many highly educated, inquisitive, independent thinking people didn’t think to question that or look into that, it frightens me.

    • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      58
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 days ago

      While the Bush administration certainly had (very obviou$) reasons for trying to downplay it, I also remember at least some scientists at the time arguing that climate change was a better term because people are particularly stupid about the term global warming when it paradoxically results in some places having a greater number of and more extreme cold events.

      Ex: every time some dumbfuck Republican brought a snowball into Congress to talk about how global warming is fake because look here’s snow!!

    • chunes@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      8 days ago

      The left went along with it because they were tired of all the “then why is it so cold in winter?” comments from the stupid half of the family tree.

    • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      8 days ago

      Good to know! They should have been a little more creative and called it something familiar and snappy like Sport Utility Environment or Gas Guzzler.

  • LogicalDrivel@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    42
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    8 days ago

    So remember that tipping point we were warned about? Yeah, its happening. The deep ocean currents in the southern ocean have reversed.. TLDR: warmer saltier carbon dioxide rich water is now coming up from the deep ocean instead of being trapped there. It is melting sea-ice from below and could eventually lead to the reversal or stagnation of other ocean currents.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      8 days ago

      Even better, this occurred about a decade ago, and we didn’t even realize it untill now… meaning the global thermohaline circulation cycle has been collapsing for a decade.

      Oops.

      Irreversible. Can’t fix.

      No going back.

      In all likelihood, we have Great Filtered ourselves.

      Best case scenario, we get a century or so, starting basically now, of civilization collapse, mass famine and death, attempts at mass migrations that mostly get Holocausted, and of course wars, potentially nuclear wars…

      …and then maybe in 100 years the remaining human population of roughly 1-2 billion can maybe figure out a new paradigm… if we have not just permanently broken the biosphere, and already extracted all the easily extractable natural resources.

      • brandocorp@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        8 days ago

        My money is on nuclear self-destruction. We have way too many of these things in the hands of extremely poor leadership. It really feels like it’s just a matter of time.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          edit-2
          8 days ago

          … I have a graphic for that, if you’re in the US.

          “I don’t want to set the world… on… fire…”

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            7 days ago

            Cascadia Subduction Zone super-earthquake.

            Imagine an 8.5 to 10 mag earthquake, but instead of at one localized point, its basically continuous along about 500 to 1000 miles of a line about 250 miles out in in the Pacific, where one tectonic plate is diving under others, but has been building up friction tension for ~300 years.

            And it normally snaps roughly every 250 years, the last time it happened it caused a tsunami that hit Japan, and is the origin of many PNW Native People’s flood stories.

            So we’re ~50 years overdue for that happening again.

            When I was a kid, they said it was a 1 in 20 chance happening in this century. Now they say its a 1 in 3 chance.

            After this process is over, after everything gets shaken to all hell, and tsunami’d… well, in many areas, the coastal plates actually end up something like 10 to 15 feet lower than it was previously…

            So those areas are now just permanently flooded, now under the new default water line.

            And if we are all super duper unlucky, this massive of an event could trigger other fault lines along the NA West Coast, in say, California…

            … and the Cascade mountain range…

            … yeah a lot of them are actually volcanoes, which were formed by this very same plate dynamic that would be snapping in a CSZ rupture… they have just been dormant for a long time… they could potentially become more active or even erupt.

            So yeah, that would/could basically destroy most of civilization roughly west of I5, on the West Coast.