When a river rises 26 feet in 45 minutes, it is hard to know what might’ve been done to staunch the damage — or to believe that we are anything close to adequately prepared for the storms to come. Too often, we’re responding to obvious threats of weather disaster less by properly adapting than by acclimating to them — with government offering a kind of shrugging indifference, too.

These days, more and more disaster stories appear to be playing out far from the coasts, in defiance of naïve intuitions about climate risk and even of our recent experience of climate horror. Five years ago, I would have told you that the most searing reminders of the worsening crisis were images of wildfire. Over the last few years, though, I’ve been more and more struck by harrowing images of inland flooding, with cities and towns entirely overrun with water, their streets transformed into rivers, and everything trapped or left behind in them turned into so much flotsam. These images are surreal showcases of a novel-seeming disaster; taken together, they also sharply expand our conceptual model of defensible space.

The regular flood of flooding imagery is enough to make you wonder whether these astounding meteorological events can be fully accounted for through the conventional explanation — that for every degree of warming, the atmosphere will hold about 7 percent more water vapor, leading to more extreme precipitation.

For decades, scientists have also warned that our behavior on the ground — deforestation, paving and industrial development, agricultural expansion and soil degradation — can contribute to storm extremes, too, by disrupting the planet’s hydrological cycle and by changing how much moisture clouds draw and discharge from the landscape.

Every weather disaster now has both human and climate causes, but we often argue about which side of the ledger should get the blame when, either way, the headline message is that we we're not ready.

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