In the aftermath of the tragic Texas Hill Country flooding, a barrage of mainstream media outlets, including; CBS Texas “History warned of the Central Texas flood: Why the danger on the Guadalupe River wasn’t a surprise,” CNN “How climate change made Texas flooding more violent,” and San Antonio Current “Bill Nye the Science Guy calls for fossil fuel ban as death toll from Texas flood continues to rise,” have advanced the narrative that climate change is turning extreme weather and deadly floods into a “new normal.” These claims are wrong, misleading, and, frankly, do a disservice to public understanding of Texas flood risk. The historical and scientific record shows no significant trend toward more frequent or severe heat waves or floods in this region. The evidence instead points to a simple, unchanging fact: Floods have happened here for millennia, long before SUVs and coal fired power plants, and will continue as long as the Guadalupe River flows.
Perhaps the most absurd quote comes from the San Antonio Current, in which Bill Nye declares:
Other than installing early flood warning systems in flood-prone areas, Nye said the only way prevent similar tragedies in the future is for Congress to enact a total fossil fuel ban to curb the effects of climate change. He added that humans’ alterations to the climate have been scientifically proven to exacerbate flooding events.
Calling for the elimination of fossil fuels as the only solution to flooding on a river that’s been flooding since before the invention of the steamboat is not a scientific argument, but a political one.
Let’s be clear: flooding along the Guadalupe River is neither new nor “caused” by today’s climate. The very first line in the CBS Texas report actually gets it right: “Texas hydrologists working with the National Weather Service say they recognized the conditions last Thursday that could lead to catastrophic flooding on the Guadalupe River. And they say, based on past events, this kind of outcome was a known risk.”
The area’s own official safety guide states:
If you live in the Guadalupe River Basin, you also live in one of the three most dangerous regions in the U.S.A. for flash floods! Local residents and weather experts refer to the Texas Hill Country as ‘Flash Flood Alley,’ because heavy rainfall and runoff from creeks and streams can cause rapid rises and flooding in a matter of hours… The Guadalupe River experienced major floods in 1936, 1952, 1972, 1973, 1978, 1987, 1991 and 1997. Last year’s flood of October 1998 developed in a matter of hours, broke most existing records, exceeded the 100-year flood plain, and inundated areas that had never been flooded before. But floods are not predictable. They do not follow measured cycles.
The fact that the area has been previously named as “Flash Flood Alley,” complete with it’s own Wikipedia page, which states: “Flash Flood Alley is an area of Central Texas that is considered the most flash-flood prone region in the United States,” should negate any climate change claims about the most recent flood all by itself.
This is not a fossil-fuel problem, it’s a geography problem. Texas Hill Country’s steep terrain, rocky ground, and narrow riverbeds react rapidly to intense rain, making the region prone to sudden, severe flooding. The river has repeatedly exceeded historic flood levels even when atmospheric CO2 was much lower than it is today.
Let’s review the record—because, unlike much of the modern media, data matters more than opinion:
- Major floods in the Guadalupe River Basin occurred all throughout the 20th century, well before the current era of supposed “climate crisis.”
- The catastrophic October 1998 flood developed in just a few hours, broke most existing records, and exceeded the so-called 100-year flood plain, flooding areas “that had never been flooded before.” The official flood guide bluntly states, “Unfortunately, an even greater flood will occur sometime in the future.”
- These events took place when global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 were lower than they are today.
The CBS Texas article actually provides a rare moment of candor:
The I-Team reviewed National Weather Service and historical crest records and found that the Guadalupe River has experienced major flooding more than a dozen times in the last century… The river in that area has been even higher four other times since tracking began, and it’s reached more than 25 feet on 15 other occasions.
Camp Mystic where many people died, and other riverside camp properties are built on a flood plain. As tragic as the deaths are, the decision to continue rebuilding and vacationing in a known, historic flood zone guarantees that people will remain at risk. Blaming “climate change” for fatalities while ignoring this fundamental fact is both irresponsible and misleading.
The CBS article quotes an unnamed Texas Severe Storms Association spokesperson who said:
“Campsites and homes in high-risk areas like the Hill Country should be relocated to higher ground and properties within the flood zone should be utilized only for day use.”
In other words, the tragedy is not about fossil fuels, it’s about ignoring land use history and basic floodplain management.
Another misleading narrative being pushed by media and pundits is the idea that deaths resulted from budget cuts at NOAA or the National Weather Service. Jason Johnson, a lead hydrologist at the NOAA West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth was also quoted in the CBS article, saying, “Despite the tragedy, Johnson said his team was staffed and ready. Forecasting models were in place. More scientists were on standby. ‘We had our best people on shift… everyone was utilized,’ he said.”
Clearly, no budget cuts affected staffing during this event.
Documents show the National Weather Service issued a Flash Flood Watch up to 10 hours before water swept through the campsites, followed by a Flash Flood Warning 3 hours ahead, giving ample time for action.
By 5:34 AM, the warning turned into a Flash Flood EMERGENCY: “A LARGE AND DEADLY FLOOD WAVE IS MOVING DOWN THE GUADALUPE.” “SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW.” shown in NWS bulletins. Campers and families were directly named in the alert:
Timely and direct warnings were issued, and it is a tragedy that people along the river either didn’t receive them, or if they did, ignored them.
The official “Staying Safe” flood guide for the Guadalupe River underscores the importance of personal responsibility:
Despite these staggering losses, more damage was prevented and lives were saved because the initial flooding occurred during daylight hours and because people listened to warnings from their local emergency management and law enforcement officials… It should also convince you that the Guadalupe Basin rivers will flood again.
Contrary to the dire claims of Bill Nye and the CNN report, data from climate agencies and historical records show no increasing trend in heat waves or flooding for Texas or the United States as a whole. NOAA’s own records indicate that the frequency of major floods nationwide peaked in the early 20th century and has not increased in recent decades. If climate change had any role in causing or exacerbating the rainfall, it should be apparent in the rainfall and flooding history of the area. Below is a chart of Texas flash floods from 1996 to 2024 that show a DECLINE in these extreme weather events.
Recent peer-reviewed studies have found no increase in the global frequency or intensity of floods, despite higher CO2 levels. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports it has “low confidence” climate change is impacting flooding and hedges its bets, noting low confidence in any detectable link between flooding trends and manmade climate change. For further reading, see comprehensive analysis at Climate At A Glance: Floods.
The real danger is that media and activist “science communicators” use every tragedy to promote costly, irrelevant policy agendas like Bill Nye’s call for a total fossil fuel ban, which would devastate the Texas economy, cripple energy reliability, and do nothing to prevent flash floods in the Hill Country. The history of the region is written in water, not carbon dioxide.
Facts say this was a natural event that has happened before and the facts remain unchanged; floods have always been part of life in Texas Hill Country and always will be. The real solution is to heed warnings, avoid rebuilding in known flood zones, and resist the urge to politicize every natural disaster as proof of “climate crisis.” If history tells us anything, it’s that ignoring the lessons of the past is a far greater danger than any supposed climate tipping point. It is shameful that Bill Nye and CNN promoted baseless and false rhetoric to gain political points.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateRealism
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The Balcones Escarpment (The Texas Hill
Country) is a common border between air masses from the Gulf and inland. Very heavy thunderstorms are common.
I live just north of the flash flood area in
Burnet county, and there were quite a lot of phone text popups warning of possible flash floods. The real issue is how to get people to pay attention to the warnings.
Houston is generally flat but I recall one storm, when I resided there, dropping 12″ in 2 hours. It flooded. I lost a car and most of my neighbors’ carpets and lower parts of drywall had to be replaced. Fortunately, no lives were lost.
I was working in Houston when the dirty side of Hurricane George dumped large volumes of rain, turning much of Memorial Drive into a canal, along with any underpasses. At the time I was living just outside Downtown (previously I had been the other end of Memorial Drive on Woodway), and I could walk to work. From my 34th floor office I could see the extent of the floods across the city. It was several days before I could leave the Downtown area.
I lived for years in NW Williamson County with much the same geology, Narrow creek and river valleys with rocky, non absorbing hillsides plagued with frequent heavy rain. Water has nowhere else to go but up. If you build in a flood plane anywhere, plan on getting your toes wet sometime or another. As a neighbor told me when I was knowingly buying some FP property “that creek might not flood again in your lifetime, or it could flood 3 times this summer. Fortunately, the creek didn’t get up into the flood plane during the 3or4 years I lived there, and better circumstances allowed me to relocate to a more reasonable spot. Don’t know how the guy that bought it from me has made out. Finally had to get away from that I35 corridor–too many Californians moving in– and now live in NW brown county sandy soil. and lots of trees, and not too much concern as to what the weather might do, since I don’t need to drive over any low water crossings –no need to go out.
That Nye guy is obviously an idiot, but I think that the “narrative” he pushes is part of an effort to collapse the economy of not only Texas, but the entire west.
Thanks for this post! It reminded me I have to, again, apologize to my son for letting him watch any of the Bill Nye The Lie Spewing Guy crap when he was in elementary school. Thank god he had a healthy dose of Jim Quinn and Mr Limbow to counteract that foul influence.
Surely the US people can use legal means to curb the lies of this fellow Nye. The words he uses distort the practical reality that people can do things to avoid drowning deaths – the danger cannot be blamed on some remote driver like climate change beyond the ability of people to deal with and the inevitability of death by Act of God.
I cannot comprehend the ignorance of parents sending their children to a nationally famous flash flood area at a time when flash floods were not unexpected. There is recent history of group drownings of 20 or more youngsters.
Personally, I worked more than most people in remote parts of Australia that were quite dangerous. For some of the time I was senior enough to contribute to and cross-check our safety measures, like use of reliable radios in more expensive reliable vehicles, minimum of 2 vehicles together when exploring some locations, training in navigation by map/air photo in case of comms failure including doing without GPS, lessons on responses to snake bite, fixing fixable auto breakdowns, carrying spare engine belts, more. We had no deaths. We lost several vehicles to fire, some from native grasses clumping next to exhaust pipes, needing rapid exit carrying water supply. Long range fuel tanks equal big combustions.
Nature is a cruel mistress who punishes the unprepared and the ignorant. Geoff S
Bill Nye the Anti-Science Guy was on PBS, which has just been defunded by the federal government. Maybe they will also cut his show if it hasn’t already been cut.
That said, anybody with more than a few functioning brain cells would be able to figure out that eliminating fossil fuels immediately would do nothing to solve this problem immediately–if it was the cause to begin with, which it isn’t.
And will China and India and Indonesia and (etc.) stop using fossil fuels “immediately?”
I think not.
In the early 1960’s, central Australia. What’s a GPS? A hassle just to get a licence for a two-way radio to work the Flying Doctor frequences.
At Gidgealpa, with United Geophysical. I didn’t get there till March 1964, so I missed the Page family episode.
I believe my somewhat facetious comment may have misled a bit. Nye is not really of any consequence, just a talking head who had a TV show in the ’90s and was pushed in public schools as a science teacher sort of feature. Started out OK then veered left and has not stopped.
As for that area of Texas and flash floods, people there have been calling for a better flash flood warning system for decades. If you have dealt with governmental ineptitude you understand why it has not been done. And I agree, those who owned and operated these various camps and campgrounds should have had radios set to NWS/NOAA weather alerts station and had someone monitoring them when they already knew there was a heightened warning issued. Multiple balls were dropped at all levels.
Yep, as a meteorologist/Risk Analyzer I cannot believe the camp personnel was not more tuned into the weather that night. Incomprehensible to me. I was at a camp with my kid (boyscouts) about 12yrs ago and we were in a large, flat valley with a river not too far from our camp and there were Thunderstorms one night. I could not sleep as I monitored the situation.
Back in the long ago(my youth) I did a great deal of backpacking, camping and canoeing. Always had my Grundig shortwave/longwave/AM-FM radio with me.
An abject lesson of flood plain management is provided by Rapid City, SD after the devastating 1972 flood which kill 268 people. After cleaning up the debris. The City of Rapid City determined the boundaries of a 100 year floodway. They repaired a dam that had been over-topped/destroyed. Further, they passed an ordinance prohibiting any overnight accommodations with in the flood way. Today only four permanent structures are located partially or wholly in the floodway. A hospital, albeit behind a levee, a high school, part of the civic center and part of
a hotel. The remainder consists of parks, picnic grounds, a golf course, various athletic fields and a bike path. Rapid City has said NEVER AGAIN!
“Other than installing early flood warning systems in flood-prone areas, Nye said the only way prevent similar tragedies in the future is for Congress to enact a total fossil fuel ban…” Bill Nye
Idiot, Bill Nye, states the obviously effective method of mitigating the serious danger of significant floods and seems to dismiss it in favor of fossil fuel bans which could not possibly provide reliable prevention of such events. Of course low lying areas of river valleys should have early warning flood alert systems. In my area we are potentially at risk from severe thunderstorms and tornados. We have NOAA Weather radios (handed out free by local TV stations and municipal government), automated cell phone alerts from multiple sources, sirens and virtually constant local radio and television coverage of storms as they move through the area. We still get dangerous storms occasionally, but no one should be caught by surprise.
Although a lot of other people died, the most tragic part of the floods on the Guadalupe River was the girls camp, where the youngest girls were the closest to the river, and the warnings were either not received or were ignored. No one can prevent people from ignoring (or failing to have the technology to receive) the warnings which were sent out with hours to spare. I also live in Tornado Alley and keep a radio on all the time, along with my cell phone with the volume up and a window cracked to hear the sirens, just in case there is a warning I need to hear.
I talked to someone whose granddaughter was rescued from the Mystic Camp. It needs to be verified but I read somewhere that their washed out dorm was given a “variance” to build in the floodplain. There is still some recent coastal construction in Texas floodplains. Nevertheless, Spanish explorers were stopped by floods and often had to construct rafts of logs, including the Guadalupe, to cross the river if no ford was found. A 17th century Frenchman was once killed by an alligator, swimming across the Colorado as I recall. Flooding towns and lesser construction occurs even in and west of the Pecos.
I posted before being very familiar with that area and had a friend who lost his RV trailer in the Sabinal River, everybody survived but owner washed downstream. Very little drainage above Utopia where it was. San Antonio, also with a small upstream drainage, had to conduct a dam, still there. Goliad, hour drive from coast, also was flooded by the San Antonio River. We were in a RV site in West Virginia once that had a careful plan to protect their electric hookups when it flooded as there was hardly any flat floodplain.
The girls camp that was hit banned electronics. They were late in reacting to warnings, with the owner also getting killed.
“inundated areas that had never been flooded before”
Never?
LOL.. The whole area near the river is a geological flood plain !!
I wonder how that formed 😉
This is exactly what I am talking about, we need to call Nye out forcefully and publicly with our best public speakers.
All these “call out!” talks are fit for 11 years old girls or so.
Consider. Tucker Carlson made Bill Nye babble and twitch on his show back in 2017, exactly for talking out of the wrong end about ManBearPig and science™.
Some people had a good laugh at Bill’s expense. Scott Adams wrote an article which some “big” blogs re-posted. More people had a good laugh, myself included.
Meanwhile Bill shook the dust off, moved on, and look at this… he still clucks to the same tune, like nothing happened. Well, then did anything happen — besides some of us having a good laugh?
If we took on Nye and the yokels like him individually this nonsense would end. We are not interested in laughing at them rather we want to show the world that they are liars and cheats and truly don’t know what they are talking about. Send our finest against them.
“Never let a crisis go to waste.”
All of this noise is just noise. These people think that if we cut our CO2 to zero we would live hazard free. Nobody asks, but they should be asked about China, India and Africa who are emitting lots of CO2. Will any future storms only effect those areas?
Cue the World War Cowfart. Duh.
If all use of fossil fuels were to stop permanently and everywhere in the world tomorrow morning at 6 a.m. Eastern, how long would it be before the climate could revert to what it was 25 years ago? 50 years ago? 100 years ago? 200 years ago? Wouldn’t we have to endure the “hyper-dangerous” climate we now live in for a very long time?
If every extreme weather event is caused by the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, how would banning fossil fuels have any effect on that for 100s or even 1000s of years?
Whether or not (Weather or not?) we ban fossil fuels, don’t we need to focus on saving lives and property in the short run?
“Campsites and homes in high-risk areas like the Hill Country should be relocated to higher ground and properties within the flood zone should be utilized only for day use.”
Was flood insurance available for these areas and if so, was it priced to include this sort of flood risk? Of course, if insurance was unavailable land price would be lower encouraging some people to buy.
Sort of like buying a “junker” car. Cheap!
These lunatics will stand on the piled bodies of children to lecture us about our lifestyles. They are despicable and have no morals or ethics.
NYE is no ‘science guy’. He is a climate profiteer. A loser creep on an immense scale. Thank you for the historical clarification.
Agree with everything else you’ve written (and admire how you’ve expressed it), but as for the place where it mattered most, this statement is quite misleading:
The 1:14 AM Warning (displayed above) that we received is far too broad, typical of all the other notices that evening.
The ~ 5:30 AM warning (also displayed above) is specific, but came ~ 90 minutes after the worst-impacted area was hit. It helped only those who were many miles downstream of the worst flash-flooding.
The 3:38 AM warning (not mentioned here, why not?) was both specific & timely, but left only ~ 22 minutes (20 minutes)* before the Guadalupe River’s upper South Fork was inundated. The local Public Safety Officers received that, understood & acted upon it, but (sadly) not every site could be reached in time.
Back in 1980 to 1984, I lived in Houston, and in the summer of 1983 went on a canoe trip down the Guadalupe River just west of New Braunfels TX, which is east (downstream) of Kerrville. The weather was dry then, and the river level relatively low, but I do remember seeing an old aluminum canoe bent around in half around a boulder sticking about 4 to 5 feet above the river surface, with both the bow and stern of the canoe pointing downstream.
Some unfortunate soul(s) must have hit that boulder broadside in a canoe during a roaring flood prior to 1983, so that this year’s flood was not the first on the Guadalupe River.