U.S. rocked by four 1-in-1,000-year storms in less than a week
U.S. rocked by four 1-in-1,000-year storms in less than a week
Climate change is making severe storms both more common and more intense.
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.
By definition those are not 1-in-1000. They were, but no longer.
Considering I'm already on my fifth "once in a lifetime" economic collapse I'm not surprised.
There are no storms in Bah Sing Se.
But if we don’t talk about it, climate change will not happen. /s
God is angry at the Republican, red states for electing Trump.
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.
They're literally turning to "weather control" conspiracy theories rather than just accepting the known science.
Because to the average ignorant mind, the conspiracy is the better choice. They can‘t change the weather anyways, so why not believe in an explanation that supports their hateful beliefs?
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."
Another term for "record fatigue" might be "maximal misery".
As in... I already feel miserable about climate change and additional bad news can't make me feel significantly worse because I can't sustain a more miserable outlook.
Another part of the same thing is that the additional news isn't actionable. We're all already living our best sustainable lives, a new record doesn't change anything.
Don't worry, it is not just in the US.
There was devastating floods in Germany about 4 years ago, killing some 200 people. Just a few months before the ruling "conservative" party CDU lead coalition in one of the states affected badly had scrapped some flood protection laws. During the election campaign for the federal election the chancellor candidate of the "conservative" party was laughing his ass off in the background as the German president held a commemoration speech for the victims in one of the villages heavily destroyed.
The CDU came out strongest again in the next state level elections, including in the areas that were destroyed by the floods and had many people killed.
And people still won't take accountability for their contributions to climate change. SMH
“Drill, baby, drill”
The stupid fucks had every chance to build a flood alert system. They refused because they did not want to be bought by the Democrats. Well, the dumb bastards fucking found out and they will not learn.
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!!
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.
That's how I recall the term climate change coming into favor, too.
That snowball guy finally died last year, thank God. Too bad it wasn't from a flood or hurricane.
The left went along with it because they were tired of all the "then why is it so cold in winter?" comments from the stupid half of the family tree.
We still get that now. As if cold things can’t exist when it’s hotter.
Trump: See how it is? Even the best storms are in the USA now! Make Rains Great Again. Glory to the beautiful me!
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
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.
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.
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.
florida is pretty much a given, building in flood prone areas is just asking for it.
I remember when 1.5C was the threshold instead of 2. We're already living in yesterday's doomsday scenario.
it's okay the trump fascists will dismantle NOAA and then we won't know any of this anymore :3
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.
Yep. SMOC reversed.
We. Are. Fucked.
Sooner or later the AMOC will start to be affected as well
Well yeah... the anti-christ has risen to power.
Some are unironically already saying it's evil liberal cloud seeding.
Reply that it's God punishing the nation for electing a pedophile president.
That and HAARP directed energy weapon
Some are already doing violence about it.
We tried to warn them.
They're not "1 in a thousand years" anymore!
They're once a week!
4 times a week now!
Something something Jews controlling the weather with chemtrails all praise Trump.
If 4 of them happened in a week, they are not once in a thousand years, lol, they are weekly occurrences
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.
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.
You tired of winning yet?
And none blasted that vile Maralago place... Fingers still crossed
thats at least 16000 years of weather!
Ignorance is bad. Willful ignorance is deadly.
Sure glad republicans are in charge of everything
No, see, all this happened to maga coded places not famously queer places, do it's not the wrath of god.
https://www.northernamericannordicsociety.com/post/orlog-hamingja-and-why-we-live-honorably
Aka the easy choice of continuing multigenerational trauma, including projection, or doing the hard, tedious work of the personal responsibility of healing society by healing ourselves.
🤔