Maybe in your town.
Certainly in my town.
Time was, in this part of the state, we’d get one flood a year. Usually March. Snows would melt with the first warm rain, and if the temps stayed balmy for more than a couple days, you’d get your snow melt and your flood.
Last few years, the tendency is for 3 or more flooding events over the course of winter-to-spring. And we are much better off than some of the plains states like Iowa.
Peter,
It’s always good to keep on the sunnyside of life.
Heck, you could be living in Galena, Alaska:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-galena-alaska-flood-20130528,0,2891601.story
And I hear it’s a dry town.
“And I hear it’s a dry town.”
Where’s a drummer when you need one?
Let me guess:
Addition water vapor, bigger storms, stuck weather systems…getting close?
And as more farming areas suffer from later season droughts, I see more and more damns and water pipelines in the future of Eaarth.
But hey, if we stop KXL, there will be lots of stockpiled pipe around.
Yes Mr. Tillerson, we’ll adapt. Like we have a choice.
Speaking of Tillerson:
….
The CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp. says there’s no quick replacement for oil, and sharply cutting oil’s use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would make it harder to lift 2 billion people out of poverty.
“What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?” CEO Rex Tillerson said at the oil giant’s annual meeting Wednesday.
Tillerson jousted with environmental activists who proposed that the company set goals to reduce emissions from its products and operations.
Shareholders sided with the company and voted nearly 3-to-1 to reject the proposal.
…..
http://www.dallasnews.com/business/energy/20130529-exxon-rejects-gay-discrimination-ban.ece
Oh My
“You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension – a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone. “
Climate on steroids was not a good analogy IMHO. Climate is a bipolar crystal meth addict
Well once again the best cite here the last IPCC report: “Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation”(2012):
“There is limited to medium evidence available to assess climate-driven observed changes in the magnitude and frequency of floods at regional scales because the available instrumental records of floods at gauge stations are limited in space and time, and because of confounding effects of changes in land use and engineering. Furthermore, there is low agreement in this evidence, and thus overall low confidence at the global scale regarding even the sign of these changes.”
We should add that:
– we now have a positive phase of the AMO,
– changes in forest area and reservoirs, up to 0.1%, may result in changes to regional flooding quantities of up to 100%, as also more. These data come from a different of papers, which is a co-author R. Pielke Sr., but is written about it, in the IPCC raport:
“Attention to the temporal and spatial dynamics of exposure and vulnerability is particularly important given that the design and implementation of adaptation and disaster risk management strategies and policies can reduce risk in the short term, but may increase exposure and vulnerability over the longer term (high agreement, medium evidence). For instance, dike systems can reduce flood exposure by offering immediate protection, but also encourage settlement patterns that may increase risk in the long term.”
Of course, it shows how a man can (considerably) affect on – change the regional climate.
Why “… even the sign of these changes.” is not known?
At the time of the former warming, globally and regionally, increased the amount of flooding?
Here we have also are very few reliable data.
Example Eemian.
Of course, the Holocene this is not the Eemian (http://www.skepticalscience.com/LIG5-1110.html: “Comparing the influences on the Last Interglacial climate with those assumed in future climate projections is problematic owing to fundamental differences, especially orbital forcing, seasonal warming, and greenhouse gas concentrations.”), but …
High latitudes – eg, Europe:
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercEUROPE.html:
“… the Eemian warm ‘optimum’ in Europe, if indeed there was a coherant warmer-than-present phase …”
“…sometime between 130,000 and 120,000 y.a. suggests relatively dry, warm summers and mild winters and is generally marked off as the warm ‘optimum’ of highest year-round temperatures (though other indicators suggest moister than present conditions during all or part of the warmest phase …”
“Mean temperatures some 2-2.5 deg.C above present values are suggested for this ‘optimum’ phase …”
“On the basis of palaeobotanical indicators, both Velichko et al. and Frenzel suggest substantially higher annual precipitation across most of Europe during the peak Eemian warm phase; 100-300mm more than present across central and western regions, and 200-300mm more in the south.”
http://www.skepticalscience.com/LIG1-0706.html:
“Overall, the early Eemian climate in the North and Western Europe was characterised as being predominantly oceanic i.e. with relatively cool summers, comparatively warm winters and reliable precipitation …”
Does this mean increase in flood frequency?
Probably not. In such a climate (ocean – sea) precipitation are higher but because they are frequent – regular, for larger areas (areas of low pressure are “a shallow” but extensive), but not because they are violent and plentiful …
P. S. Incidentally, as well as generally, is the Eemian climatic conditions conducive to our civilization?
Hogan (2011, http://www.eoearth.org/article/Eemian): “Consequently the Eemian may have played a crucial role in allowing Homo sapiens sapiens to colonise Europe beginning about 100 thousand years before present (kya). In other words, without the Eemian warming, modern man may have had a more difficult time supplanting Neanderthals, had the H.neanderthalis species not been weakened by the end of the Eemian. “
Most likely, these so-distant times survived in our mythology – religion as of human – prehistoric the memories of living in the Paradise …
And our winner in today’s Hell & High Water competition has to be Oklahima City where they have had 11 inches of rain reported by one weather spotter, with much more rain expected overnight. Meantime, there were four tornadoes on the ground in OKC and its suburbs earlier this evening. Mass casualties including deaths as the storms struck during rush hour with massive traffic jams on interstates and arterials.
Follow the blow-by-blow (pun intended) at this blog:
http://tinyurl.com/lsh85uj