The Texas Flash Flood Is a Preview of the Chaos to Come

[Brenda]

Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people’s everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable.

Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods.

The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It’s one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense.

What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.

The Chump Team is obviously trying to cull. Allowing if not actually causing people to die preventable deaths. And by people, I mean everyone except The Fucking Filthy Rich Parasites of Humanity.

First it was just the immigrants who speak Spanish, but look how quickly is has now become okay to let white girls at a Christian summer camp die. To ignore any possible survivors of the flood for DAYS.

https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-flash-flood-camp-mystic-climate-change-trump-noaa-fema

[still-prayin4rain]

1. Yep, I totally agree. We have a bumpy ride ahead with a bunch of sadists in office.

[bronxiteforever]

2. Good article. We lost 4 precious years

with TSF now in office along with his end-times fools.

[Kaleva]

3. With China now producing as much greenhouse gases...

as all the other industrialized nations combined, the world’s fate is sealed regardless of Trump.