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.
There are no storms in Bah Sing Se.
No, see, all this happened to maga coded places not famously queer places, do it’s not the wrath of god.
You’d think that would be eye opening and somewhat concerning to folks. But I’ve found what tends to happen is ‘record fatigue’.
We’ve had ‘record high’ temperatures here in the Netherlands frequently the past few years. Meaning, the news will report ‘it’s the hottest july 1st since the start of the measurements’ and that ‘the previously hottest july 1st was in 2017’
Basically, it’s telling you two things:
- it’s a record high temperature
- the time between these records is decreasing.
Which obviously means things are getting worse. But most people just shrug and go ‘Gee, another record high temperature, how boring, those happen so often’.
Same thing with other types of problematic weather. At least stuff like record rainfall or flooding is hard to ignore.
I think this too, but I think the reason people get desensitized to it is that it just happens so frequently that it turns into background noise. Similar to alarm fatigue that nurses experience in ERs. Sort of an interesting piece of alarm fatigue is that too many warnings make people ignore them completely, and we get increasingly alarming news about climate almost daily at this point.
I think the reason people get desensitized to it is that it just happens so frequently that it turns into background noise.
This, but also a, “WTF more than I’ve already done am I supposed to do about it?” attitude.
The billionaires are still globetrotting in their private jets. The corporations are still spewing out pollution in the name of shareholder value. And our political leaders are, at best, saying, “Golly, maybe we should do something about this,” and at worst, actively denying that there’s a problem and doing everything they can to block any attempts to fix anything.
So you can’t really be surprised when regular people just throw up their hands and say, “Fuck it! I did my part. I need to prioritize protecting myself and my family now.”
Absolutely understand the point of view, but also think the doomer mentality is exactly what those fuckers want. I know this will be a huge shocker, but the richest people running around causing the most pollution are broadly made up of actual narcissists. They don’t care about the future past themselves, and they don’t care why people quit giving a shit as long as they can continue with their lifestyle. Oil companies are also just fine with doomers, too, as long as they aren’t actually doing anything about it.
I think the doomers have alarmed me almost more than the deniers. I can’t really argue with them like I can deniers, because they are working on the same set of facts. All I can do is basically plead with them to start giving a shit, which is almost as ineffective as arguing with deniers. I think more painfully is that it means we’ve just given up on trying to make things better. That we’re ready to just lay down and let the planet be squeezed by the greed of a few. Which means that we’ve given up on even a CHANCE that we’ll make the changes necessary to stop climate change.
Trying to stop that well funded greed train means taking a LOT of L’s. I’m just not a person that gives up easily. I genuinely believe that if we all keep hammering on it then it still has a chance of changing. That if we keep it as a priority that we can at least stick it to those greedy fuckwits a tiny bit. More than that though it means that we still have a chance to actually tackle this problem, where the doomer mentality takes that chance away.
On the other hand, I also spend my free time hand writing letters to conservative politicians to get them to replace Confederate statues with statues of John Brown. So my tolerance for pissing into the wind is quite high.
They’re literally turning to “weather control” conspiracy theories rather than just accepting the known science.
If 4 of them happened in a week, they are not once in a thousand years, lol, they are weekly occurrences
Question is, if it is a 1:1000 year event locally, state level, country wide?
These terms are often thrown around rather broadly by media, which does not help their use and makes it easy for cliamte change deniers to attack it.
These terms also provide a false sense of security. For instance we had a “thousand year” flood in parts of Germany in 2021 that killed about 200 people. The statisticians then said that because of climate change, this is now a “four hundred year flood”. But the kind of weather event that is producing these enormous rainfalls leading to the flooding actually occurs about twice a year now. It is just the question where the downpour comes and if it can dissipate in flat land, or if it comes down in the mountains, washing away everything in the valley. So that “four hundred year flood” is probably occurring more like once a decade but in different places in the future.
Believe it or not, there’s actual science and statistics that go into what is considered a “100 year storm” or “1000 year storm”, and yes they will be adjusted. That’s how it’s meant to work.
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.
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.
So, Canada, then?
I am unironically moving to Minnesota ASAP.
Cheapest to live in decently blue state, all the climate risk assesments I’ve seen seem to show that, as long as you’re not living right on the Mississippi, pretty low comparative climate risks… oh, and their housing market (thus economy generally) is fairly stable, compared to about half of the rest of the country, whose housing market is currently crashing harder than the 06-08 GFC.
Canada isn’t a bad option at all, but its actually fairly difficult to legally migrate there.
Its gonna be really, really funny when the Canadians start deporting waves of poor Americans fleeing northward, in about 5 to 10 years.
…ye gads, just imagine how bad the mosquito clouds are going to get…
it’s okay the trump fascists will dismantle NOAA and then we won’t know any of this anymore :3
I remember when 1.5C was the threshold instead of 2. We’re already living in yesterday’s doomsday scenario.
florida is pretty much a given, building in flood prone areas is just asking for it.
lots of stuff will be in trouble.
Like, civilization?
Depends on where you live and how smart the people there were about planning for climate change. Residential houses are probably not the biggest issues. Its the more extreme constructs like skyscrapers and bridges that might be in trouble sooner than that.
Or you know, the global supply chain and food systems. Breadbaskets will need to function throughout all this.
Yeah ofcourse, there are going to be problems in every aspect of our lives. I was just specifically thinking about this statistical thing that is used for building safety considerations during construction.
And none blasted that vile Maralago place… Fingers still crossed
You tired of winning yet?
They’re not “1 in a thousand years” anymore!
They’re once a week!
4 times a week now!
Ignorance is bad. Willful ignorance is deadly.
Trump: See how it is? Even the best storms are in the USA now! Make Rains Great Again. Glory to the beautiful me!
Bullshit. Trump will blame this on Democrats.
Kamala Harris as seen by MAGAts:
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.
Unfortunately he does. The aftermath of this regime will take a minimum of 50 years to fix, if it can be.
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.
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
Lets hope he doesn’t nuke the next one.
https://www.axios.com/2019/08/25/trump-nuclear-bombs-hurricanes
Something something Jews controlling the weather with chemtrails all praise Trump.
Considering I’m already on my fifth “once in a lifetime” economic collapse I’m not surprised.
The weather this year is scaring me more than normal in south Texas. Not because the abnormal amount of rain but because the absolute lack of heat. Usually this time of year it’s 100+ for weeks on end.
…yeah, last year i was telling everyone to enjoy the hundred-degree weeks while they can because it would be the coolest summer for the rest of their lives, then this year comes a long and spoils it…
Ok
Don’t worry. It will come back worse soon enough. Climate change doesn’t just mean everything gets hotter. It also means everything gets more extreme, including cold events or these storms that prevent the heat from forming.
That’s exactly what scares me. It’s gonna be 100 in November 😭
Why would Joe Biden do this?
Honestly it was Obama. Biden died long ago and the wh just used a clone of him. See he used biden as a puppet so he could still have access to the white houses adrinochrome stash. They keep it stock piled in the basement.
Source: my friends older brother that smokes weed all day
Some are unironically already saying it’s evil liberal cloud seeding.
Reply that it’s God punishing the nation for electing a pedophile president.
Some are already doing violence about it.
We tried to warn them.
