Propublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates power abuse. Sign up and receive the biggest story as soon as it’s published.
On July 4th, the broken remains of a powerful tropical storm drifted out of warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, with the more water it seemed to stumble under the luggage. It then collided with another flooded system that slid north from the Pacific Ocean, causing the storm to wobble, and the clouds turned over, causing a staggering 20-inch rainfall in central Texas. In its thrust blackness, the Guadalupe River, discharged from the hill countryside, rose over 26 feet in just 45 minutes, jumped over the bank and sped downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children, in a summer camp located within a federally designated floodway.
Over the days and weeks to come there, the analysis of who will blame this heartbreaking loss is exhausting. Should Carr County, where most of the deaths occur, be required to install warning sirens along the channel’s stretch? Why were children allowed to sleep in areas with high speed flash flooding tendencies? Why emergency updates seem to have been communicated only on mobile phones and online in rural areas with limited connectivity. Has the National Weather Service, which is enduring sudden budget cuts under the current administration, predicted the storm properly?
These questions are important. But there are also much greater concerns. The rapid onset of destructive climate change driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal makes such disasters more common, more fatal and far more expensive for Americans, despite the federal government fleeing policies and research that could begin to address it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson explained in 1965 that burning fossil fuels had caused the climate crisis, and was warned that it would create conditions that would intensify storms and extreme events, and the country, including 10 more presidents, discussed how to respond to the warning. Still, it took decades for the world to reach its current stage as slow motion changes have grown large enough to affect people’s daily lives and safety.
Climate change does not diagram linear paths that are warmer than the last each day. Rather, science suggests that we are now in an age of discontinuity, one day evoking a more dramatic extreme extreme. The whole planet is dry, while wet areas are wet. The Jetstream – a band of air circulating through the Northern Hemisphere – is sometimes slowing down to nearby food stalls, weaving up the tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar water. Meanwhile, the heat has been sucked in from the drought-stricken plains in Kansas, and it has abandoned it to Spain to contribute to last year’s cataclysmic flood.
We saw countless things in between when Hurricane Harvey dumped 60 inches of rain in parts of Texas in 2017, and when Hurricane Helen devastated North Carolina last year. I saw it again last weekend in Texas. Warm seas evaporate faster, warm air holds more water, transports it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, no longer able to hold it and transports it until it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere reached its capacity for moisture before the storm hit.
Disasters occur in the week when extreme heat and extreme weather hit the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are just as out of control as parts of California. In the past 72 hours, the storm has torn the roof from the building of a five-storey apartment building in Slovakia, but heavy rain has transformed the streets into rivers in southern Italy. The same story was in Lombok, Indonesia, cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, inland typhoon-like storms sent furniture out and blew down the streets like many papers. Leon, Mexico, was attacked by a very thick hail on Monday, covering the city of White. And once again, North Carolina is enduring 10 inches of rain.
There is no longer arguing that climate change is clearly exacerbating many of these events. Scientists who conducted a rapid analysis of the extreme heat wave spreading across Europe last week concluded that human-raised warming had killed about 1,500 more people than would have otherwise died. Early reports suggest that floods in Texas were also heavily affected by climate change. A preliminary analysis by Climameter, a joint project between the European Union and the French National Centre for Science and Research, Texas weather was 7% wet than before climate change warmed parts of the state.
It should not be a surprise now that America is once again upset by its familiar yet surprising headlines and body counts. According to global weather organizations, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped five times worldwide over the past 50 years, with deaths almost tripling. In the US, which prefers to measure losses in the dollar, the damage caused by major storms exceeded $180 billion last year, almost ten times the average annual sacrifice in the 1980s after explaining inflation. These storms now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of major disasters per year has increased seven times. The deaths from last year’s $1 billion storm alone were roughly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years from 1980 to 2000.
But the most worrying fact may be that the planet’s warming has barely begun. As each step-up on the Richter scale represents a significant increase in seismic force, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degree stop in the next Celsius is considered to be much greater than that caused by the 1.5 degree we have endured so far. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations Panel on Climate Change, and even many global energy experts, have warned that they are facing something similar to our last chance before it’s too late to contain the runaway crisis. This is one of the reasons why our prediction and modeling capabilities have become an important life-saving mechanism for national defense.
Trump’s first EPA has pledged to crack down on eternal chemicals. His second EPA is being pulled back.
What’s extraordinary is that in such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration not only minimizes climate risks, but also revokes funding for data collection and research that will help them better understand and prepare for this moment.
Over the past few months, the administration has repaid much of the work of the National Maritime and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s leading climate and scientific institution responsible for weather forecasting, as well as research into cutting-edge earth systems like Princeton University, which is essential to model an extraordinary future. We have cancelled the country’s ingenious scientific assessment of climate change and risks. The administration has threatened to repay the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program that pays for infrastructure projects to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency that supports Americans after climate emergency situations like the floods in Texas. As of last week, it signed a law unlocking federal programs intended to unlock federal programs by helping the country’s industry move towards energy cleaning. And it even stopped reporting disaster costs, saying that doing so “aligns with the administration’s evolving priorities.” It’s as if the administration hopes that by making flood prices in Kerr County invisible, the events unfolding there will be less devastating.
Given the abandonment of policies that could prevent more serious events like the Texas flooding, reducing the emissions that cause them put Americans in the difficult task of adaptation. In Texas, it is important to ask whether the protocol is sufficient at the time of the storm. This week, it is not the first time that children have died in flash floods along the Guadalupe River. According to reports, county officials struggled with fundraising and refused to install a warning system in 2018 to save about $1 million. But the disaster faces a bigger and more challenging challenge as it raises the question of whether people can continue to live safely, just as the Los Angeles fires and hurricanes repeatedly smack Florida and the Southeast. In an age where researchers call it “megarain” events, flood planes should now be off limits.
