A Climate of Flooding

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The main way into Hardin, a village in western Illinois, is over the Joe Page Bridge. But the rising waters of the Illinois River flooded the bridge earlier this month, forcing it to close.

“Now the only other way out for the vil­lage’s 1,000-plus res­i­dents is to the north via tens of miles of wind­ing, poorly paved coun­try roads that are barely wide enough to al­low a ve­hi­cle go­ing in each di­rec­tion,” The Wall Street Journal’s Erin Ailworth wrote recently. “A 20-minute drive to a gro­cery store will now take a few hours — and it could be this way for months.”

Hardin is suffering from the floods of 2019. The Arkansas River, Missouri River and Mississippi River have also overflowed their banks recently, damaging homes, ruining harvests and disrupting life. A few parts of the Midwest that experts thought would flood only once every 500 years have been overrun this year. At least 30 different places in Iowa and Nebraska have seen record flooding. The small city of Kimmswick, Mo., had to cancel its annual Strawberry Festival, which usually draws 50,000 visitors and accounts for a major portion of the city’s budget, Ailworth explained.

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The main cause of the floods is extreme rain. The 12-month period ending in May was the wettest 12 months over the 124 years for which the federal government has data. And the reason that we’re suffering from more extreme rain appears to be climate change.

Warm air can carry more water than cold air. Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton researcher, compares warmer air to a bigger bucket: It can carry more water from oceans and then dump that water on land. Since the early 1980s, as the earth has warmed, the number of extreme rainstorms has risen by more than a third.

You can’t blame any one storm or flood on climate change. You can blame the increasing frequency of storms and floods on climate change.

And it seems that a growing number of Americans are becoming worried about climate change specifically because of the weather.

Since 2011, George Mason and Yale universities have conducted a series of surveys about climate. Over that time, the share of Americans who say they are concerned about climate change has risen. The No. 1 reason that respondents cited was that they were “directly experiencing climate change impacts.” Another leading reason was that they were “hearing about climate change impacts.”

As the survey researchers wrote, “This suggests that efforts to communicate about the reality of human-caused climate change, and its current relevance to Americans — including its impacts on local temperatures, precipitation, and extreme weather patterns — may be helping some Americans better understand the problem.”

For more …

• Mitch Smith and John Schwartz of The Times noted that mayors across the Midwest were trying to avoid talking about climate change while responding to the flooding. I understand why the mayors are acting this way, given the polarized politics of climate change. But it’s a little like pretending that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. We’ll be more likely to prevent future damage if we acknowledge reality.

• Joshua Cho of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a media watchdog group, criticized a more recent Times story on the floods for not mentioning climate change in its 2,400 words.

• In USA Today, three mayors of riverside cities wrote an op-ed acknowledging the role of climate change — and calling for some smart responses.

• “We tend to focus on how coastal cities, with their sprawling miles of pavement and rain-grabbing skylines, turn hurricanes and atmospheric rivers into deadly urban flash floods. Or how they’ll get swamped first by sea-level rise,” Wired’s Megan Molteni wrote. “But climate change will bring more moisture to the middle parts of the country too, and after decades of draining wetlands and clearing forests for agricultural use, those changes to the timing, type, and amount of precipitation will fall on a system already profoundly altered in ways that make flooding much more likely.”

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