Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumClimate change's fingerprints are on U.S. Midwest floods: scientists
Source: Reuters
ENVIRONMENT MARCH 21, 2019 / 5:17 PM / UPDATED 6 HOURS AGO
Climate change's fingerprints are on U.S. Midwest floods: scientists
Timothy Gardner
4 MIN READ
(Reuters) - Climate change played a hand in the deadly floods in the U.S. upper Midwest that have damaged crops and drowned livestock, scientists said on Thursday, while a Trump administration official said more homework was needed before making that link.
The bomb cyclone that dumped rain on Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri and killed at least four people now threatens a wider region downstream of swollen rivers and smashed levees.
Manmade greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the oceans and making the air above them more humid, scientists said. When a storm picks up and eventually spits out that moisture, it can be devastating for people caught below.
The atmosphere is pretty close to fully saturated, its got all the water it can take, said Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Big storms like the bomb cyclone and Hurricane Harvey, which smacked Houston in 2017 with record downpours, are where the impact of climate change can most clearly be seen, he said, adding that climate changes fingerprints were all over the recent storm.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-weather-climatechange/climate-changes-fingerprints-are-on-u-s-midwest-floods-scientists-idUSKCN1R22I8
greyl
(22,990 posts)on The Weather Channel a couple days ago. He was blaming the Army Corps of Engineers for designing a dam and levees poorly - the levees responsible for preventing extreme flooding due to climate change.
SMH
BigmanPigman
(51,590 posts)This country had better start adapting to the coming changes in all of our lives in one form or another. Climate change is here and NOW, not later. We are all out of "later" at this time in history.