Before you can have a flash flood, you’ll need to have a lot of rain, but would it surprise you to know that the latter does not predict more of the former? I was surprised, so it might shock, astound, and astonish the Chicken Little climate grifters exploiting the recent tragedy in Flash Flood Alley for clicks and cash. They do, after all, need you to read, watch, and listen, and then become very afraid, but as you look across the historical landscape of climate alarmism, you’d be right to question their science and motives.
If they were investment bankers, they’d be out of business and likely in the stocks and up on RICO charges for fraud. But they are in the investment business. Diverting financial resources. They get politicians to take money from productive people and purposes and waste it in the name of their sky-is-falling theology. The Guadalupe River flood is just one of the latest examples.
Flash flood alley ought to have given away the truth of it, but grifters gonna grift, and the climate is always gonna change. Points to them for choosing that name, but they had to. Global warming stooges arguing that more snow was a sign of man-made climate (something something) after telling us for years kids would’ know what snow appears to have demanded a brand shift.
You are making the weather worse, regardless. That lie was followed by another one – that warming was bad and that it could be fixed with enough “money from someone else, or “other people’s” money, neither of which is true.
The “more rain” doesn’t mean “more flooding” thing is one of those peculiar phenomena, like how, despite all the drought chatter in the Northeast over the past few decades, we are historically about as wet as we’ve ever been. Granted, the official human records are only 130 years long, politicized for almost as long, though not as intensely as the past forty years. The hottest, coldest, wettest, driest stories, whatever it is on record, is limited to an infinitesimally tiny jot of information in the climatic history of the Earth, which is many billions of years.
As for extreme precipitation and flash flooding or just more flooding, at the simplest level, this seems like it ought to be true, but not even the IPCC could make that leap. There’s no data demonstrating a connection. Correlation is not causation. Yes, we’ve seen more rainfall generally, but no increase in flooding.
You can read the post that triggered mine here, along with the cited research; however, I’ll let Roger Pielke Jr. summarize the results, as he did all the heavy lifting (emphasis mine).
- Some climate scientists and journalists are promoting misinformation by claiming that flooding has increased because of increasing extreme precipitation;
- It is true that increasing trends have been detected in some metrics of extreme precipitation, and also that the IPCC has attributed these trends to accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere;
- However, metrics of flooding, including flash flooding, have not shown corresponding increases. In fact, the IPCC has not detected an increase in flooding at the global scale, and across regions the IPCC finds various increasing and decreasing trends;
- Thus, these activists are taking a consensus finding of the IPCC (heavier rainfall) and using it to undercut another consensus finding of the IPCC (no increase in flooding). That’s a good way to destroy trust in climate science overall;
- Some have even gone so far to suggest cynically that energy policy can be used as a control knob to limit or even prevent flooding. It can not.
Despite numerous studies, including from the Pharisees at the IPCC the end result is the same. Science says CO2 and flooding have no connection, regardless of any cyclical rise in rainfall or excessive rainfall.
While the discrepancy between the consistent signal found for precipitation and the lack thereof for floods may appear surprising at first sight, it can be explained by the diversity and the complexity of flood-generating mechanisms (Sharma et al., 2018). For instance, Tramblay et al. (2019) showed that antecedent moisture conditions could resolve an apparent contradiction between increasing heavy precipitation and decreasing floods in Mediterranean France. Brunner et al. (2021) also demonstrated the existence of a catchment-specific threshold below which flood changes do not reflect precipitation changes due to the confounding effect of land surface processes.
Much like everything else “climate,” there is so much more we don’t know that pretending we do to run a con ought to have burned its credibility by now. Over the past forty years, the fraudsters have predicted nothing accurately. A great many things were so wrong that it can’t be stated strongly enough: were this any other serious area of study, the perpetrators would be reduced to selling their blood and volunteering for pharmaceutical studies to afford a five-dollar meal deal before retiring to their cardboard box in the K Street NW underpass.
Excess CO2 can’t accelerate anything past atmospheric saturation, and we may already be there. Life has survived and swelled at significantly greater concentrations. Any warmth, regardless of its cause, can’t be proven to be detrimental to human existence and is likely beneficial. There are numerous factors that the models can’t or don’t account for, especially how they interact, which may explain why predicting the weather just a few days in advance remains less than accurate, making 50-100 year climate predictions impossible.
But they’ll keep trying and claiming they can because it pays, and that’s the problem. That needs to stop, and thank you, Trump Administration, for working on that.
