A Climate of Flooding
Warmer air, heavier rain — and more recognition of global warming.
By David Leonhardt
Opinion Columnist
June 14, 2019
The main way into Hardin, a village in western Illinois, is over the Joe Page Bridge. But the rising waters of the Illinois River flooded the bridge earlier this month, forcing it to close.
“Now the only other way out for the village’s 1,000-plus residents is to the north via tens of miles of winding, poorly paved country roads that are barely wide enough to allow a vehicle going in each direction,” The Wall Street Journal’s Erin Ailworth wrote recently. “A 20-minute drive to a grocery store will now take a few hours — and it could be this way for months.”
Hardin is suffering from the floods of 2019. The Arkansas River, Missouri River and Mississippi River have also overflowed their banks recently, damaging homes, ruining harvests and disrupting life. A few parts of the Midwest that experts thought would flood only once every 500 years have been overrun this year. At least 30 different places in Iowa and Nebraska have seen record flooding. The small city of Kimmswick, Mo., had to cancel its annual Strawberry Festival, which usually draws 50,000 visitors and accounts for a major portion of the city’s budget, Ailworth explained.
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The main cause of the floods is extreme rain. The 12-month period ending in May was the wettest 12 months over the 124 years for which the federal government has data. And the reason that we’re suffering from more extreme rain appears to be climate change.
Warm air can carry more water than cold air. Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton researcher, compares warmer air to a bigger bucket: It can carry more water from oceans and then dump that water on land. Since the early 1980s, as the earth has warmed, the number of extreme rainstorms has risen by more than a third.
You can’t blame any one storm or flood on climate change. You can blame the increasing frequency of storms and floods on climate change.
And it seems that a growing number of Americans are becoming worried about climate change specifically because of the weather.
Since 2011, George Mason and Yale universities have conducted a series of surveys about climate. Over that time, the share of Americans who say they are concerned about climate change has risen. The No. 1 reason that respondents cited was that they were “directly experiencing climate change impacts.” Another leading reason was that they were “hearing about climate change impacts.”
continues at nytimes.com |
