On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm have unscrewed the warm waters of the Mexican Gulf, so heavy from moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, confronted with another brain system, which slides north of the Pacific ocean, the thunderstorm hesitated, and its clouds overturned, bringing southern Central Texas with an unusual 20 inches of rain. In the previous darkness, the Guadalpepe River, which drains from the country of the hill, increased by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, gnawing its shores and making their way down the current, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children in a summer camp located in a federal post.
Within the days and weeks that come there will be tirelessly, and justified, the analysis of the one who is guilty of this heart loss. Should Ker County, where most of the deaths occurred, installed sirens to prevent this area of the waterway, and why did the children sleep in the area prone to floods at high speed? Why were urgent updates, apparently transmitted only to a mobile phone and on the Internet in rural limits? Was the National Weather Service, which continued a steep budget reduction under the current administration, predicted this storm properly?
These questions are important. But this is a much bigger problem: the rapid start of devastating climate change – caused by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal – makes catastrophes as this more common, more deadly and more expensive for Americans, even if the federal government escapes from policies and research that can start doing this.
President Lindon B. Johnson informed In 1965, the climatic crisis was caused by burning fossil fuels, and it was warned that it would create conditions for strengthening thunderstorms and extreme events, and this country – including 10 other presidents – discusses how to respond to this warning since. However, it took decades to change slow motion to grow big enough to affect the daily life and safety of people, and in order for the world to reach the scene it is now: the chaos era, which is governed by climate, where the past is no longer a gap, and specific problems of the future can be predicted but less predictable.
Climate change does not reflect the linear path where every day is warmer than the last. Most likely, science suggests that we are now in the era of the break, with the heat once, and the next and more dramatic extremes. Throughout the planet, dry places become more dry and wet places become more wetter. Reactive flow is a strip of air that circulates through the northern hemisphere – sometimes slows down to a close stall, weaving its traces, causing unprecedented events such as polar whirlings, drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile, the heat sucking moisture from the drought that has dried Kansas plains, only to drop it through Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysm.
We saw something like that when Harvey Hurricane dropped up as much as 60 inches of rain in the Texas areas in 2017, and when the hurricane Helen devastated North Carolina last year – and countless times between them. We again witnessed this in Texas last weekend. Warm oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air keeps more water, transporting it in the form of humidity in the atmosphere until it no longer contains it and falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere reached their ability to moisture before hitting a thunderstorm.
The catastrophe comes during the week when strong heat and extreme weather beat the planet. Parts of Northern Spain and Southern France are burned out of control, as well as parts of California. Over the last 72 hours of the storm, the roofs from the five -story apartment buildings in Slovakia have thwarted, while heavy rainfall turned the streets into rivers in southern Italy. The same story in Lambok, Indonesia, where the cars floated like buoys, and in the east of China, where an internal typhoon, similar to a thunderstorm, sent furniture blowing through the streets, as well as many bundles of paper. Leon, Mexico, was killed by a hail so thick on Monday as covered by the city white. And the North Carolina, again, lasts in 10 inches.
There is not much discussion that climate change makes many of these events demonstrated even worse. Scientists who conduct a quick analysis of a strong thermal wave last week, which spread all over Europe, concluded that a warming caused by man, killed about 1500 people than perhaps otherwise died. Early reports suggest that climate change has also greatly influenced the flood in Texas. According to previous analysis According to Clammeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Scientific Research Center, the weather in Texas was 7% more wetter than before climate change this part of the state, and only natural variability cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological state.”
The fact that the United States once again feels strongly from acquaintances, but anxiety headlines and body counting should still not be a surprise. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped five times worldwide over the last 50 years, and the number of deaths has almost three times increased. In the US, which prefers to measure its dollar losses, last year the damage from large storms amounted to more than $ 180 billion, which is almost 10 times the average annual number in the 1980s after accounting. Now these storms cost Americans almost $ 3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has increased seven times. Last year, last year, the mortality rate in billions of thunderstorms was almost equal to such deaths counted by the federal government between 1980 and 2000.
The most disturbing fact may be that the warming of the planet is unlikely to begin. Just like every step on the Richter scale is a large -scale increase in the strength of the earthquake, the damage caused by the following 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming, has much more than a 1.5 degree that we still survived. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations group on climate change and even many world energy experts warn that we face something similar to our last chance before too late to reduce the escape crisis. This is one of the reasons that our forecasts and the possibilities of modeling become an important, rescue mechanism of national protection.
It is extremely extremely extremely that at such a changing moment, the Presidential Administration, Donald Trump, would not only be to minimize the climatic danger – and thus the suffering affected by it – but to recall the financing for the data and research themselves, which will help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.
Over the last couple of months administration has Received most of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationThe main climate and scientific agency of the country responsible for the weather forecast, as well as advanced research of the Earth’s systems in places such as the University of Prince, which is essential for the modeling of the aberrant future. He canceled the seed scientific assessment of the country and the risks of the country. The administration has abandoned the main program of the Federal Emergency Agency, which paid for infrastructure projects designed to prevent large disasters, and it threatened to eliminate the Fema itself, the main federal agency accused of helping the Americans after the emergency climate. He – since last week – has signed legislation that solves federal programs to slow the warming, helping the country’s industry to switch to more pure energy. And this even stopped the report on the cost of the disaster, saying it was “in accordance with the development of the priorities” of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes to make a price tag for the Flood of Ker, will make the events unfolded there, seem less destructive.
Given the abandonment of a policy that can prevent more serious events, such as Texan Flood, reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans leave a terrible task of adaptation. In Texas, it is very important to ask if the protocols were good at the time of the thunderstorm. This week is not the first time the children died in a flash rally along the Guadalupe river, and Offer reports The county’s representatives fought for the raised money, and then refused to set up a warning system in 2018 to save approximately $ 1 million. But the country is faced with a greater and terrible problem, because this catastrophe is like Firestorms in Los -Angeles and Hurricanes, repeating Florida and the South East – once again raises the question where people can continue to live safely. Perhaps in the era of what researchers call the events of “mega”, now there should be floods.
