Jeff Goodell explains the mindset that has made Florida uniquely vulnerable to climate change and sea level rise.
Jeff’s new book is “The Water Will Come”.
Jeff Goodell explains the mindset that has made Florida uniquely vulnerable to climate change and sea level rise.
Jeff’s new book is “The Water Will Come”.
What scares me about Houston is this was basically a huge rainstorm. Granted, it was given birth by remarkably high sea temperatures, and in future we will see more devastating rain events coming to seashores.
But we also now have two storms becoming more and more common, storms that simply didn’t occur enough when I was growing up to even get a name:
Rain bombs ( wet microburst) and derechos (straight -line wind events)
and these can happen inland, hundreds of miles from a seacoast.
intense rainfall events appear to be increasing:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/large/public/2016-07/heavy-precip-download1-2016.png
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/linkableblob/2739602/data/gliksongraph7-data.jpg
Enough “high water” events to go around, I guess.
Here’s a more up to date chart of Munich Re’s data. The trend has continued.
http://volewica.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/number-of-natural-catastrophes.html
Rain bombs are not necessarily “wet microbursts”, in that they can cover much larger areas, as in the region of Louisiana (including Baton Rouge) that had widespread heavy rain in 2016.
Interesting that there seems to be an ~11 yr periodicity signal in the “extreme 1-day rain” graph, and that the maximums line up with solar minimum. Random chance? A cause/effect mechanism doesn’t immediately occur to me.
They do not fit…nor does the trend….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_minimum
;))