Floods In Texas — It’s The Climate, Stupid!
An ocean of words have been written about the devastating floods in Texas that killed more than 100 people last week. Was it Elon Musk’s fault for getting DOGE to slash funding and cut jobs at NOAA, which is the parent organization of the National Weather Service? Possibly. It would be hard to argue those cuts had no effect. The warning about the extreme flooding may have been “sub-optimal,” as the political apologists like to say, but focusing on that aspect of the tragedy really misses the point.
The facts are not in dispute. According to a report by Le Monde, “In 45 minutes, the Guadalupe River rose by 8 meters (26 feet). This sudden flooding was triggered by torrential rainfall in the center of the state of Texas, in the southern United States. Nearly 300 millimeters (12 inches) of rain fell per hour — about a third of the region’s average annual precipitation — all at once.”
Go back and read that again. The area got a foot of rain in one hour! The river rose 26 feet in 45 minutes! These are not normal numbers. These are not extraordinary numbers. These are off the charts outrageous numbers! The elephant in the room is why did a foot of rain fall on Kerrville, Texas in one hour? The obvious answer is: because changes in the Earth’s climate make such anomalies far more likely.
Bloomberg reports that the area around Kerrville has received very little rain in recent months, while higher than normal temperatures have baked the Earth day after day and week after week, making it nearly impermeable to moisture. With the land unable to absorb the torrential downpour, the water had nowhere else to go except downhill into the Guadalupe River basin. But that begs the question: why was there so much moisture in the air that 12 inches of rain in an hour was even possible? The answer to that question, as most CleanTechnica readers know, is climate change, or global heating if you prefer.
Floods Are On The Rise
“One of the clearest fingerprints of the climate crisis is the uptick in heavy rain events, like the one responsible for the tragedy in Texas this week,” Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center told Brian Sullivan of Bloomberg. “Texas is particularly flood-prone because the fever-hot Gulf of Mexico is right next door, providing plenty of tropical moisture to fuel storms when they come along.”
As climate change warms the world, the atmosphere can hold more moisture. For every 1.8°F (1°C) increase in temperature, the air can carry about 7% more moisture. The mechanics are so well-studied, Bloomberg says, the formula for it has a name — the Clausius–Clapeyron equation, which is used to calculate the saturation of water vapor pressure to temperature, said Ryan Truchelut, president of commercial forecaster WeatherTiger. “The carrying capacity increases faster and faster as the temperature increases,” he said.
But that isn’t the only issue fueling the mechanics of drought and floods. Warmer temperatures lead to more evaporation, particularly over the ocean. “Human-caused increases in heat-trapping greenhouse gases have warmed oceans, which evaporate more moisture into the warmer air,” Jennifer Francis said. “Not only does this moisture increase rainfall, but it also fuels stronger storms.” The rains in Kerr County also got a boost from moisture flowing north from the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which had made landfall on Mexico’s east coast a week ago, the National Weather Service reports.
According to SeaTemperature.org, the average temperature in the Gulf of Mexico today is 29.4°C/84.9°F. That is bathtub temperature, and some people may find it too hot for swimming. We also know that warmer air holds more moisture, making the rains, when they come, heavier than normal. When Houston was devastated by flooding 7 years ago, climate scientists found the rains were 15 percent heavier because of higher air temperatures.
Do Nothing, Say Nothing
Since then, Texas has done nothing to protect people from climate change. Instead, it has turbocharged its oil and gas industries and invested billions to protect them from more severe storms and rising sea levels. It has also sued a number of banks and investment companies, accusing them of of racketeering because they promoted climate action.
But now that tragedy has struck in Kerrville, pols from Governor Greg Abbott to Senator Ted Cruz are sending flotillas of thoughts and prayers to the families of the victims. Those presidential jock sniffers have been heaping praise on the federal government for doing what it is supposed to do, which is provide assistance to citizens who have been walloped by a natural disaster.
A study published on Monday by ClimaMeter found that the floods in Texas were exacerbated by “very exceptional meteorological conditions” that cannot be explained merely by natural variability. The authors — Davide Faranda of the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in France, Mireia Ginesta of the University of Oxford in the U.K., and Tommaso Alberti of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Italy — argue that the meteorological conditions present at the start of the Texas floods on July 4 “were characterized by slightly negative surface pressure anomalies over Central Texas, with values ranging up to –2 hPa, indicating the presence of a weak low-pressure system over the region.” They also found that “temperatures were significantly below the climatological average for this time of year, with anomalies reaching –5°C across much of the area affected by the flooding.”
The researchers then compared how extreme weather events that occurred under meteorological conditions similar to those present during this week’s floods would have manifested had they occurred in the years from 1950 until 1986, a three-decade period during which human-induced climate change had yet to cause a global surface temperature spike. They concluded that the meteorological conditions ahead of the deadly Texas floods this year were as much as seven percent wetter than those that had proceeded past floods in the region.
The ClimaMeter study adds weight to statements from climate scientists over the weekend who argued that there was no question that human-induced climate change — driven largely by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels — tipped the floods into historic disaster territory. “The tragic events in Texas are exactly what we would expect in our hotter, climate-changed, world,” said Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysics and climate hazards at University College London. “There has been an explosion in extreme weather in recent years, including more devastating flash floods caused by slow-moving, wetter, storms, that dump exceptional amounts of rain over small areas across a short time.”
The answer is no mystery. Burning fossil fuels is slowly killing us all and many of our political leaders are just fine with that. Why would anyone vote for someone who wants to make them less healthy so that they lead shorter lives? That’s the question that needs answering, not whether the person responsible for issuing flood warnings in Kerr County, Texas, was awake and on the job before disaster struck. Vote as if your life depends upon it, because it does.
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