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.
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.
Like, civilization?
Uh yeah, actuaries have already determined the world GDP will be catastrophically damaged, forever, if we don’t limit warming to 2C.
https://actuaries.org.uk/document-library/thought-leadership/thought-leadership-campaigns/climate-papers/planetary-solvency-finding-our-balance-with-nature/
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.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/homeowners-insurance-crisis-hitting-these-15-states-report-says-101524.html
https://theconversation.com/why-insurance-companies-are-pulling-out-of-california-and-florida-and-how-to-fix-some-of-the-underlying-problems-207172
https://abc13.com/post/farmers-insurance-companies-leaving-states-aaa-what-are-high-climate-risk/13518796/
…
tl;dr: You have no idea how fucked we all are.