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.
Trump: See how it is? Even the best storms are in the USA now! Make Rains Great Again. Glory to the beautiful me!
deleted by creator
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.
Uh yeah, actuaries have already determined the world GDP will be catastrophically damaged, forever, if we don’t limit warming to 2C.
We already blew past 1.5C, if you didn’t know… and also, the trend in the last decade is continuously that the climate is breaking harder and faster than the scientific consensus broadly projects… so its probably gonna be actually worse than this.
…
US insurance companies have already figured out that roughly the bottom 1/3 of the US will be uninsurable in 10 years… which is why they’re either massively upping insurance rates, or largely pulling out of the home insurance business in CA, FL, other southern US states and regions, which is causing all these states to bankrupt themselves as they try to offer a public/government version of home insurance, but refuse to tax people appropriately or fairly to be able to actuslly fund such an endeavor.
Generally, you can’t get a home mortgage without insurance, you can’t own and rent a place out if you don’t have property insurance.
…
tl;dr: You have no idea how fucked we all are.
lots of stuff will be in trouble.
Like, civilization?
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
… I have a graphic for that, if you’re in the US.
“I don’t want to set the world… on… fire…”
