From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Roger Pielke Jr skewers the latest alarmist hype:
Everything is getting worse, right? Flooding especially. NPR tells us that:
Heavier rainstorms driven by global warming are sending more water into residential neighborhoods from the Gulf Coast to New England to Appalachia to the Pacific Northwest.
A Federal Emergency Management Official official explained to The Washington Post:
We know that as climate changes, the impacts are getting worse. We’re seeing more and more flooding going on as a result.
Everybody knows this — it is conventional wisdom.
Not only is the conventional wisdom on flooding wrong, data show that flood impacts as measured by direct economic losses have actually decreased by about 90% since 1940 as a proportion of U.S. GDP. The United States is in fact more resilient to flooding than it has ever been. The reduction in flood impacts is an incredible story of success sitting out in plain sight that is completely ignored, in favor of stories that instead tell us that down is up.
The figure below shows U.S. annual flood damage as a proportion of GDP. In 1940 flood losses amounted to a 2023 equivalent of about $50 billion per year, and in 2022 they totalled about $5 billion, a reduction of over 90%.¹
Full post here.
As Pielke notes, economic impacts, whether good or worse, tell us nothing about climate impacts. If you want to analyse them, you need to look at the actual weather and flooding data.
And according to the EPA, there is no evidence that climate change has made flooding worse in the USA. All we see is the usual mixed bag, including increased flooding magnitude in some areas, mainly the Northeast, and decreased magnitude in others.
Figure 1. Change in the Magnitude of River Flooding in the United States, 1965–2015:
This figure shows changes in the size of flooding events in rivers and streams in the United States between 1965 and 2015. Blue upward-pointing symbols show locations where floods have become larger; brown downward-pointing symbols show locations where floods have become smaller. The larger, solid-color symbols represent stations where the change was statistically significant.
Interesting report, and again, a Reality Check. One clear problem with the advance of “civilization” is the tendency to make the local area impermeable, whether by paving roads and streets or parking lots, or putting roofs on everything, so the rain fall is much more concentrated in the runoff pattern. The other problem is the tendency to expand housing onto obvious flood plains. Finally, flood control dams and reservoirs, some of which also provide hydroelectricity, are so anti Gaia and against some ideas of natural order, that they are not in favor. Thanks to Gilbert White for actually advancing civilization.
“…flood control dams and reservoirs*, some of which also provide hydroelectricity,
are so anti Gaia and against some ideas of natural order, that they are not in favor.“
*bolding added
_________________________________________________________________
A Google search on “united states dam removals” turns up this statement:
According to the non-profit advocacy organization American Rivers,
1,951 dams were removed in the United States between 1912 and 2021.
The peak year was 2018, which saw 111 removals. Pennsylvania removed
364 dams in this period, more than any other state.
And you don’t have to search very far to find articles like this from NPR:
How climate change drives inland floods
Climate change means more flood risk across the United States.
That includes places far from the ocean and sometimes far from
rivers and streams, but where rain storms can still cause
dangerous flash floods.
I just love it that NPR fails to mention the nearly 2000 dams that have been
removed over the last 100 years. A [Ctrl F] “dams” search on their article
turns up 0/0.
And if you follow the link to Roger Pielke Jr’s figure that didn’t appear in the
above article, you will note that there is a concentration of “Blue upwards
triangles” in Pennsylvania.
(Let’s see if I can make the WUWT insert image function work properly.)
While living in the Limon Province of Costa Rica I noticed that the banana plantations were being converted to pineapple and 2 to 3 meter ditches were made to make the ground drier. This resulted in large downstream runoffs, ie flooding, for the people closer to the coast.
I would oppose more pineapple plantations until the US adopts a law imposing the death penalty for putting pineapple on pizza.
😆😅🤣😂
Better pineapple than anchovies in my book.
Find a spicy shrimp diavalo pizza, should contain proper amounts of anchovies
So good
Bromelain is made from Pineapple and is become more and more in demand to counteract the spike protein from the mRNA jabs. I would give big odds this is why the switch.
“the latest alarmist hype”
Must by definition be worse than the last hype. There’s no going back.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/environment
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/energy
What do you call someone who hails the virtues of fossil fuels? Those clever kidz at the Grauniad have the answer….
“Forget virtue signalling. Vice signalling is now all the rage – and the Tories are experts”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/06/forget-virtue-signalling-vice-signalling-is-now-all-the-rage-and-the-tories-are-experts
I’m stuck with nullius in verba. That’s the way it is. The Tories are a nanometre away from the rest of the woke.
No they’re not. I discern no Tory qualities in the party; none at all. They are woke, green, spendthifts, with a strong authoritarian streak. They are a vile party.
(Yes, I am a lapsed Tory. You can probably tell.)
Correction:
greenGreenYou can’t exactly deny the ever so slight delay in some of the green measures. Slight changes that prompted…
“UN to seek assurances UK will not renege on net zero pledge
Concerns ahead of Cop28 climate summit that Rishi Sunak among leaders backsliding on green measures”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/03/un-to-seek-assurances-uk-will-not-renege-on-net-zero-pledge
So with that and Israel in mind I think stating that the Tories are a millionth of a millimetre away from threst is pretty accurate.
My knee jerk reaction is if the EPA says flooding is down, then it actually is up!
A lot of big flooding comes from the Pacific express on the left coast and hurricanes and N’Easters on the east coast and GOM. The lack of hurricanes making landfall is down the past few years and the SE US is actually been fairly dry. Tropical or sub-tropical sourced systems are primarily the ones with all the water in them and as they have diminished somewhat, so has the flooding.
I’m sure the cycle will reverse sometime in the future and we will be bringing out the boats in small towns hundreds of miles from the coast, but not right now.
What is wrong here is the definition of ‘Flood’
Attached is a screenshot of the monthly weather from a station in North Carolina.
(I didn’t cherry pick that station, I started from own in Cambridgeshire UK, zoomed out the map, crossed the pond and picked one station at random from that part the US)
It covers the whole month of July this year and what you don’t see is that a total of 170mm rain fell on that station in July this year.
Fantastic, no sign of a drought there then.
What you do see is that the rain fell in only six, well time-separated, events.on individual days to see that that rain came down at rate
Visit the station itself to see that that rain came down at a rate of (as per the 9th of July) at a rate of 5 inches per hour
If you were under that, what would you say?
Would you be ‘out of order’ for using the word ‘flood’
Especially as the gutters of your house would be overflowing, drains along the road would be boiling up, normally dry creeks and streams would be hellish torrents of mud and low lying sections of roads everywhere would be under 6″ of water that ‘came from nowhere‘
Then just as quickly vanished. (No it didn’t, it’s in the photo at the top here)
But, it was just you that saw that. neighbours 5 miles away would have seen a black cloud on the horizon but otherwise nothing.
Until a similar torrent hit them the next day while you were back outside sunbathing.
Would you and your neighbour be justified or not in talking about ‘floods’
Consider a farmer who has just planted a field of seeds of some/any sort.
And 3 inches of rain come down inside an hour and when it stops, all his hard work is in that ocean of mud in the picture, again at the top this story
Or another farmer who saw his peach trees stripped bare, his olive grove flattened or his wheat-field steam-rollered?
BUT – would their stories make it as far as NOAA or EPA when they compile their stats?
You get the drift…
i.e. Pielke here is a man standing in a hail of machine gun fire but, so far, has avoided being hit
Or the guy who fell out the airplane without a ‘chute – counting down his own altitude and keep repeating ‘So far so good, what’s all the fuss about parachutes?’
The trouble then is EPA/NOAA and their definition of ‘flood’ or especially defining the magnitude of an event that makes it countable.
All those myriad individual disasters simply don’t make the grade – they’re counted as ‘just bad luck’
But they’re not ‘bad luck’ – rainfall in a properly functioning climate should NOT be coming down at 5 inches per hour.
To all intents those storms were Tornadoes that didn’t quite ‘make the grade’
It’s a nice picture at the top, all that lovely brown muddy water.
Soil Erosion can be sooooo photogenic
Here you can clearly see that Anderson Cooper has been affected worse by flooding than the man nearby. That’s how climate worls… apparently.
Zzzz
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/15/another-fakenews-video-cnn-anderson-cooper-hypes-hurricaneflorence-flooding-meanwhile-firefighters-spoof-tv-news/
fat fingers – the sentence got chopped/moved…
Reformat;
** What you do see is that the rain fell in only six, well time-separated, events
(with a rate of 5″ per hour on the 9th)
Fat fingers?!
I disagree completely with your over-the-top scenario. There was less than 7″ of rain that month, and it fell in “6-time separated events”. Clearly, this does not describe a 5″ per hour deluge that would cause the dramatic flooding you created.
I don’t see where 5 in/hr for 15 or 20 minutes is that unusual. We call it “a downpour”. I live near Detroit, my brother lives on the other side of Detroit, about 45 minutes away. There have been days where one of us has three inches of rain and the other has sunny skies. I don’t know the distribution of heavy vs. light rain in my city, but we have short, heavy rainstorms with cold fronts and light all-day rain with warm fronts, so I’m guessing about a 50/50 split.
Peta,
You apparently live in an area that produces the same type of storm event as my area … 80 to 90 percent of the rainfall shows consistently throughout the storm, with a 10 to 20 percent increase (dump) over an hour or two. Modeled as a type IIa storm event on the USA (north) west coast.
On the east coast the rain falls out of the sky in a completely different manner.
When I was a kid, and saw curb inlets longer than 3 feet (Maryland & Los Angeles), was when I realized that there are other weather events that are not typical of where I live.
(regional flooding is regional and impervious are does not matter. local flooding/ponding is related to runoff conditions & collection conditions & receiving stream conditions)
Is anyone actually surprised that media and academia lie all the time about every single issue?
From the linked EPA report” ” become smaller and less frequent in other places.”
There we have it. Whatever happens, it’s caused by the evil “Climate Change”! Everyone must eat bugs and drive EVs
Darn, no ‘edit’. Here’s the complete quote: Climate change may cause river floods to become larger or more frequent than they used to be in some places, yet become smaller and less frequent in other places.
Aka. “How do YOU spell W-E-A-T-H-E-R?”
The doom trend
And it’s down in a big way…
Labour is up by 3 points in the polls. The gap between the parties has widened to 24 points, with Labour on 47 points, compared the Tories’ dire 24.
https://order-order.com/2023/11/09/labour-lead-up-to-24-points/
Candles on stand-by
Bottled water, candles and a camping stove already in the cupboards. I’m starting to stock up on canned goods. I might not need them, then again, I might.
Now that there are cellphone cameras everywhere we get to see the videos of the floods for ourselves. In the past, most of the flood stories wouldn’t even have made the national newspaper front page.
Hey people of the US, be warned (sarc)
The public doesn’t understand the risks of a Trump victory. That’s the media’s fault
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/09/trump-president-democracy-threat-media-journalism
So, now you know
Wow, that is a study in psychological projection.
Amazing, eh!
BINGO! They make you tear down dams and then complain about flooding, and demand money.
Urbanization and the resultant increase in impervious surface area (buildings, pavement, etc) definitely tends to increase the volume of stormwater runoff compared to vegetated undeveloped land surfaces. So the tendency is towards more flooding over time. However, counterbalancing the effects of more impervious area is greater attention to stormwater management by governing authorities and building codes over the last several decades …. hence we see stormwater retention and detention ponds with engineered outfall structures, swales, ditches, dams, etc. Also modern building codes that take into account ground surface elevations relative to peak floodwater elevation, and specification of minimum first floor building elevations.
Regardless of any claimed increases in precipitation – there is none – precipitation is only one of many factors that control whether flooding occurs. Infrastructure design and construction; rainfall intensity AND duration; antecedent soil moisture; vegetation; soil types or rocky ground; ground surface elevation profiles; tides; wind speeds and duration; barometric air pressure at the surface; snow cover; and more. Whether flooding occurs at a given time and given place involves all of those factors.
Example: a half inch rainstorm spread over a day at relatively high vegetative cover in flat terrain area with sandy soil might experience no flooding. The same half inch rainfall over 15 minutes in a dry desert area with steep terrain could easily cause a deadly flash flood.
Well it sure is looking like Texas to Florida along the Gulf coast will go from drought to flood conditions in the next 30 days or so.