This article appeared for the first time in Propublica, an investigation room of the Pulitzer Prize. Register for the Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this in your reception box.
On July 4, the broken remains of a powerful tropical storm detached from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with humidity that it seemed to switch under its load. Then, by collizing with another soggy system sliding towards the north of the Pacific, the storm fogged and its inclined clouds, southern Texas in southern Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In prevented darkness, the Guadalupe river, which flows from the country of the hills, increased by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and rushing downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children in a summer camp located inside a flooding route designated by the federal government.
During the days and weeks to come, there will be a tireless – and justified – analysis of which is to blame for this heartbreaking loss. Would the county of Kerr, where most of the deaths have taken place, would they have installed warning sirens along this extent of the navigable track, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area subject to sudden high-speed floods? Why were urgent updates apparently only transmitted by mobile phone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Does the National Weather Service, harden steep budget cuts within the framework of the current administration, adequately plan this storm?
These questions are essential. But the same is true for a much greater concern: the rapid appearance of disruptive climate change – motivated by the combustion of oil, gasoline and coal – makes disasters like this more common, more deadly and much more expensive for Americans, even if the federal government flees the policies and research that could start to remedy it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was informed in 1965 that a climate crisis was caused by the combustion of fossil fuels and was warned that he would create the conditions for the intensification of storms and extreme events, and this country – including 10 other presidents – has debated how to respond to this warning since. However, it took decades in slow motion to develop enough to affect people’s daily life and security and for the world to reach the stage in which it is now: an era climate -oriented chaos, where the past is no longer a prologue and the specific challenges of the future could be predictable but are less predictable.
Climate change does not draw a linear path where every day is warmer than the previous one. Science rather suggests that we are now in an era of discontinuity, with the heat one day and salvation next and with more dramatic extremes. Through the planet, dry places become drier while humid places become humid. The Jet Stream – The air strip circulating through the northern hemisphere – sometimes slows down a nearby stall, weaving its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far to the south. Meanwhile, the heat sucks the humidity of the Kansas drought plains to throw it on Spain, contributing to the cataclysmic floods from last year.
We saw something similar when the hurricane Harvey poured up to 60 inches of rain on certain parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year – and countless times between the two. We witnessed it in Texas last weekend. The warmer oceans evaporate faster and the warmer air contains more water, transporting it in the form of humidity through the atmosphere, until it can no longer hold it and fall. Meteorologists believe that the atmosphere had reached its humidity capacity before the storm strikes.
The disaster occurs for a week during which extreme heat and extreme weather conditions beat the planet. Certain parts of northern Spain and the south of France burn out of control, as are parts of California. Over the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs of five -story buildings in Slovakia, while intense precipitation transformed the streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, in Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an interior typhoon type storm sent furniture to the streets like so many strips of paper. Leon, Mexico, was beaten by the hail so thick on Monday that he covered the city of Blanc. And North Carolina hardly hardens 10 inches of precipitation.
There is no longer a lot of debate that climate change aggravates many events. Scientists carrying out a rapid analysis of the extreme heat wave of last week which propagates through Europe concluded that the warming caused by man killed about 1,500 people more than that could have perished otherwise. The first reports suggest that the floods in Texas have also been substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis of Climmeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Center for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% more humid on July 4 than before climate change warmed this part of the State, and natural variability cannot explain “this very exceptional weather condition”.
The fact that the United States is once again in shock from familiar but alarming titles and body counts should not be a surprise now. According to the world meteorological organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has almost tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage caused by major storms were more than $ 180 billion last year, almost 10 times the average annual toll in the 1980s, after taking inflation into account. These storms have now cost the Americans nearly 3 dollars. Meanwhile, the number of major annual disasters has multiplied by seven. Deaths in storms of $ 1 billion last year were almost equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000.
The most worrying fact, however, is that the global warming has barely started. Just like each step on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the strength of an earthquake, the damage caused by the following 1 or 2 degrees of warming are much higher than those caused by the 1.5 degrees that we have so far endured. The main scientists in the world, the United Nations Panel on Climate Change and even many global energy experts warn that we are faced with something that looks like our last chance before it is too late to reduce a fascia crisis. This is one of the reasons why our predictions and our modeling capacities become an essential mechanism and saving national defense.
What is extraordinary is that so as volatile, the administration of President Donald Trump would not only choose to minimize climate danger – and therefore the suffering of people affected by IT – but to revoke the funding of collection and data research that would help the country to better understand and prepare for this time.
Over the past two months, the administration has funded a large part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the main climate and the scientific agency of the country responsible for weather forecasts, as well as the search for advanced land systems in places such as Princeton University, which is essential to model an absurd future. He canceled the country’s seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The Administration financed the main program of the Federal Emergency Management Agency by paying infrastructure projects intended to prevent major disasters from causing damage, and it threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency responsible for helping Americans after a climate emergency such as Texas floods. Last week, he signed a signed legislation which is dismantling federal programs intended to slow down warming by helping the industries of the country to move on to cleaner energy. And this even prevented the declaration of the cost of disasters, declaring that this is “in alignment with the evolutionary priorities” of the administration. It is as if the administration hoped that the production of the price for the flood of the county of Kerr invisible would make the events which take place there seem less devastating.
Given the abandonment of a policy that could prevent more serious events such as Texas floods by reducing the programs that provoke them, the Americans are left to the intimidating task of adaptation. In Texas, it is essential to wonder if the protocols in place at the time of the storm were quite good. This week has not been the first time that children have died in a sudden flood along the Guadalupe river, and reports suggest that county officials have struggled to collect funds, then refused to install a warning system in 2018 to save around $ 1 million. But the country faces a larger and more intimidating challenge, because this disaster – like the Los Angeles Fire Storms and the Hurricanes defeating Florida and Southeast on several occasions – once again raises the question of where people can continue to live safely. It may be that at a time of what researchers call “mega rain” events, a flood plain should now be prohibited.
