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.
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!!
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.
That was in 2015:
https://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/politics/james-inhofe-snowball-climate-change/
God, I wish it only happened once.