{"id":34893,"date":"2025-07-24T23:23:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T23:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/34893\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T23:23:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T23:23:08","slug":"how-climate-change-is-making-extreme-rain-more-frequent-and-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/34893\/","title":{"rendered":"How climate change is making extreme rain more frequent and dangerous."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

July has been a month of floods. First came the July 4 deluge in the Texas Hill Country, which killed 135 people. Deadly flooding in New Mexico followed the next week. Then a record day of rain pummeled New York City, killing two people in New Jersey and sending waterfalls into the subway system.<\/p>\n

More extreme rainfall is a well-documented consequence of climate change, because a hotter atmosphere holds more moisture. With 3,600 flash-flood warnings in 2025 and the year barely half over, the National Weather Service is likely to pass<\/a> its annual average of 4,000 warnings before long. And yet Americans remain ambivalent about the growing risk of floods.<\/p>\n

This spring, the \u201cClimate Change in the American Mind<\/a>\u201d survey from researchers at Yale and George Mason University showed that large majorities of Americans believe rising carbon dioxide levels are affecting a variety of environmental problems, especially extreme heat, droughts, wildfires, and flooding.<\/p>\n

But when asked to describe their own personal exposure to those risks, Americans\u2019 concern level drops substantially. In the case of flooding, just 28 percent of respondents were \u201cvery\u201d or \u201cmoderately\u201d worried about extreme weather\u2013related flooding in their area, a lower score than any other surveyed event except \u201creduced snowpack.\u201d<\/p>\n

This reverse empathy gap shows up in data about other perceived social problems, such as crime, where respondents justify their media-experience dissonance by concluding that the consequences of an issue are borne primarily by other people.<\/p>\n

The data helps illustrate why it has been so hard to adjust to our new and very rainy reality, an atmospheric shift toward heavier precipitation that threatens rural Texas<\/a> and New York\u2019s 1 train<\/a> in equal measure. Rainfall flooding has become an increasingly serious problem, overwhelming social and physical infrastructure. It has upended our sense of \u201cclimate havens<\/a>,\u201d as places like Madison, Wisconsin; Buffalo, New York; and rural Vermont have been swamped by unprecedented precipitation events in recent years. But if Americans aren\u2019t worried about flash flooding, what\u2019s going to keep us dry?<\/p>\n

Rain may be a less intuitive consequence of global warming, suggested Jennifer Marlon, a scientist with Yale\u2019s Program on Climate Change Communication, which conducts the survey. Unlike heat waves and melting ice caps, which are obvious consequences of a hotter planet, the new prevalence of extreme rainfall requires \u201canother link in the causal chain,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n

It can be hard to isolate the cost of rainfall flooding, since much flood damage falls under the umbrella of hurricanes, which have been by far the most expensive category of U.S. disaster over the past 30 years. But 54 percent of their fatalities since 2013 were caused by freshwater flooding, according to a Washington Post analysis\u2014double the historical average of 27 percent.<\/p>\n

The Post\u2019s investigation concerns Hurricane Helene<\/a>, and contrasts the outcomes for coastal Florida counties with those of inland North Carolina, where the storm destroyed towns and killed over 100 people last year. Coastal areas were both better prepared and more sternly warned, even though the potential for deadly flooding inland was also forecast days in advance. In an analysis of cellphone data, the Post found a 36 percent spike in people leaving Florida counties in the run-up to landfall. In North Carolina, there was no meaningful movement at all.<\/p>\n

Keri Stephens, an expert in disaster communications at the University of Texas, said that rainfall flooding poses several special challenges. First, hurricanes aside, rainfall flooding is usually a \u201crapid-onset disaster\u201d akin to an earthquake, where it\u2019s hard to alert people in advance. The messaging problem begins in elementary school. There is no \u201cStop, drop, and roll\u201d equivalent for a flooding event, she said, and her work shows that young people do not respond to \u201cTurn around, don\u2019t drown.\u201d (The materialist \u201cKeep your car high and dry\u201d has more success.)<\/p>\n

At the same time, she said, people who experience nonfatal flooding events and live with constant warnings start to view them as less serious. This process of \u201chabituation\u201d can undermine a good communication program. In Japan, which has a sophisticated flood warning system, residents accustomed to safety have begun to ignore evacuation orders<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rainfall is also hard to predict, which gives pause to officials who are wary of losing the trust of the public. After the deadly Fourth of July floods in Texas, for example, the Kerrville city manager said<\/a> that authorities were reluctant to \u201ccry wolf\u201d and order evacuations.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Henry Grabar
\n It\u2019s a Natural Resource We Don\u2019t Think About Often. Public Health Depends On It More Than Ever.
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

One issue for both forecasters and local officials is the variability of extreme rainstorms: Unlike heat waves or storm surges, which tend to blanket the areas they hit, rainstorms can form \u201cmosaics,\u201d in which one neck of a valley or one neighborhood of a city may see much more rain than a neighboring area.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpecifically for precipitation, the effect of natural variability in the system is larger than the effect of climate change,\u201d Iris de Vries, a researcher at MIT studying climate extremes, told me. These pockets of intense rainfall often take residents by surprise, even if they are part of a familiar-looking storm system. \u201cMost disasters that could happen haven\u2019t happened yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In addition to putting record amounts of moisture into the atmosphere, which has induced more extreme rainstorms, climate change also makes these calamities harder to anticipate, explained Bernhard Rappenglueck, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Houston. That\u2019s because weather systems appear to be slowing down. A fast-moving storm will drench a large area, but a slow-moving storm (like Hurricane Harvey, which stalled over Houston in 2017) will bring outsize consequences wherever it decides to hover. That can \u201ccause drastic changes of rainfall amounts over shorter distances,\u201d Rappenglueck told me.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s to be done? The obvious step is to adapt our infrastructure to accommodate new expectations of storms, whether through alert systems, storm sewers, floodwalls, or green infrastructure. But that takes money, and unfortunately, things are moving in the opposite direction, with the Trump administration clawing back money from studies on public transit resilience and anything else that mentions climate change. Or we could ask why, despite flooding\u2019s intensity, unpredictability, and ubiquity, Americans seem unworried by the threat of rain. Perhaps it\u2019s just harder to see than other disasters. Unlike the ocean, whose breakers instantly communicate danger, the culprit in a flooding event could be as unimposing as a tiny creek or a clogged storm drain. It doesn\u2019t look like much until the water is at your door.<\/p>\n

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