It’s Not Just Fire — It’s Flood Too.
Changing climate means everything is going to be under stress in ways that will change what we think of as ‘normal’. Increased fire risk is what California is going through, and the western states are experiencing hotter and drier weather generally. Part 1 looked at the scope of the fires in California, and the rest of the story around them. Things are happening back east too.
As the Washington Post reports, the East is getting its own share of climate change grief. Tim Craig and Angela Fritz reported back on June 24, 2018:
Immense rains are causing more flash flooding, and experts say it’s getting worse
Experts say the immense rains — some spawned by tropical ocean waters, others by once-routine thunderstorms — are the product of long-rising air temperatures and an increase in the sheer size of the storms. Because warmer air can hold more water, large storms are dropping far more rain at a faster clip.
Such rains in recent weeks have deluged the Great Lakes region, the Deep South and the suburbs of major cities along the Atlantic coast. Philadelphia, Charlottesville, and Ocean City, Ellicott Cityand Frederick in Maryland all have experienced major flooding since mid-May. Several locations in Maryland had their wettest May on record, including Baltimore, which tallied more than eight inches, most of which fell in the second half of the month.
The radar estimates 9.6 inches of rain fell midway between Ellicott City and Catonsville, with somewhat lesser surrounding amounts. It indicates about 6 inches fell in Ellicott City proper.But weather radars notoriously underestimate rainfall. Automated rain gauges in and around Catonsville, at ground zero, recorded nearly 13 to 15 inches of rain. The National Weather Service received a gauge report of 8.4 inches in Ellicott City....As we wrote after the 2016 flood, Ellicott City sits at the bottom of a topographical funnel, at the confluence of several streams feeding into the Patapsco River.Now add to that acres of impervious land surface: blacktop, concrete, rooftops, channelization, developed areas around the rim of the funnel. Add inches of water in a few hours, and you have a guaranteed recipe for a flood disaster.
Since 1880, global temperature has risen just more than 0.13 degrees per decade, for a total of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius). The amount of water air can hold is based on temperature — put very simply, the warmer the air is, the more water it can hold.
Theoretically, experts say, an additional 1.8 degrees would amount to about 7 percent more water in the air, resulting in a similar increase in extreme rainfall. But what Prein and other researchers have found is much higher across a vast portion of the United States.
According to the 2014 National Climate Assessment, the eastern half of the continental United States has seen the most dramatic change in extreme rainfall. The amount of rain during the most extreme storms in the Northeast has risen 71 percent since 1958; in the Midwest, heavy rain has increased 37 percent; in the Southeast, it’s up 27 percent.
The future can not be denied or delayed. It keeps on coming, 60 seconds worth every minute. What we do now determines where we end up.
The 100th Meridian used to be the rough boundary between drier western climate and the more humid east. It’s moving eastward. Hardiness zones — the maps showing where plant species can thrive depending on their cold-hardiness —are shifting northward. Sea levels are rising — the coastal areas are where much of the world’s population lives are in jeopardy. Basics such as food supplies and drinkable water are increasingly at risk — and massive displacements of people will only make matters worse. Add disease, famine, and war to the mix of the rising death toll from climate change.
The immediate consequences of climate change are already costing the US billions of dollars in damages, and the direct and indirect death toll is not negligible either. If we had been attacked by a foreign power or an alien invasion force, the response would be immediate, robust, and sustained, and no sacrifice would be too great. In the face of a threat that is amorphous, omnipresent and intimately connected to our current way of life, the adjectives that come to mind describing our actual response are confused, inadequate, and oblivious.
This is going to continue for the indefinite future. Even in a best case scenario, no one alive today will live to see things turned around back to the way they were. There are now too many of us, too much of the damage to come is already in motion, and too many of those in power are either in denial or their wealth and power depends on the status quo. Even a massive technology break-through like practical fusion power combined with massive artificial carbon removal from the atmosphere couldn’t turn this ship around immediately.
In the absence of a sustained maximum global effort to stop climate change now, the metaphor that comes to mind is the Titanic and the iceberg.
We’ve seen it, we’re still headed for it, surviving a collision is problematic — and we KNOW we don’t have enough lifeboats for everybody. We’re being led by a lunatic captain whose response is to deny there’s an iceberg while calling for even more speed. Can we wrestle the wheel away from him, and can we change course in time to minimize the impact? — because a collision of some kind is unavoidable.
The Titanic metaphor may be even more appropriate than most people know. A journalist is advancing a theory that the ship was fatally weakened by a fire that had started in a coal bunker weeks earlier— and it couldn’t be put out without completely emptying the bunker. Rather than take the time necessary to do so and make the necessary repairs, the ship sailed regardless because the owners were desperate for the money from the voyage and ignored the risks.
“Beautiful clean coal.”