The extreme weather events predicted for decades by climate scientists have been on parade in the Southern United States all year. Are we ready to say, "this is climate change"?
[Updated August 18, 2016 - the headline was updated to reflect the correct duration of time.]
"Climate change is never going to announce itself by name. But this is what we should expect it to look like," according to an article by Jonah Engel Bromwich about the recent catastrophic flooding in Louisiana.
According to the narrative built by the article, the recent floods in Louisiana are just the latest in a series of extreme events that are resetting expectations about the severity weather events. It's hard to deny that weather events are worsening in Louisiana:
The flooding in Louisiana is the eighth event since May of last year in which the amount of rainfall in an area in a specified window of time matches or exceeds the NOAA predictions for an amount of precipitation that will occur once every five hundred years, or has a 0.2 percent chance of occurring in any given year.
As Engel Bromwich notes, it's not just Louisiana facing new levels of precipitation in short bursts of extreme weather, "five other states, most of them in the South, that have experienced deadly flooding in the last 15 months, including Oklahoma, Texas, South Carolina and West Virginia." That local trend is contributing to a global fact of life, according to Engel Bromwich: "The third National Climate Assessment, released in 2014 by the United States Global Change Research Program, showed that 'the amount of rain falling in very heavy precipitation events' had been significantly above average since 1991."
FULL STORY: Flooding in the South Looks a Lot Like Climate Change
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