Image via WikipediaPopular Mechanics: What Happens When a Super Storm Strikes New York?: Canton, Mo., a town of 2500 on the upper Mississippi River, has been at the center of an increasingly high-stakes environmental wager for years now. In the summer of 1993, a high-pressure system stalled over the southeastern U.S., forcing the jet stream, laden with moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, to the north, where it collided with cold air from Canada. As a result, rainstorms drenched the upper Midwest. Many towns received two to six times the normal amount of rainfall for June and July. ...... The Mississippi River crested at 13.8 feet above official flood levels in Canton, overtopping several local levees. That year, more than 1000 levees ruptured or overflowed along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Seventy towns, including Canton, flooded. The water stayed high for six months. ...... According to government statistics, the flood that Canton experienced in 1993 was a freak, one-in-500-year event—not something that would happen again soon. That estimate came from analyzing the 140-year historical record—calculating the frequency of floods of various magnitudes and extrapolating the curve out to events at a scale never seen before. If only it were that simple. Canton suffered another 500-year flood in 2008, a 70-year flood in 2001, and 10-year floods in 1996, 1998 and again in early 2011. Plenty of towns across the region have suffered similar events. ....... "We're witnessing higher and higher floods over time," says Robert Criss, a hydrogeologist at Washington University in St. Louis. "We are seeing higher and far more frequent floods than government estimators say we should."A few years back there were unexplained fires across Greece. And law enforcement grabbed known arsonists and threw them into prison. Those were not acts of arson. That was global warming. People who study and predict weather look for patterns in historical records. That is misleading. Global warming is a recent phenomenon. New weather patterns are emerging. More frequent severe weather conditions are being experienced.
Global warming is happening, and it is happening now, and there are to be catastrophic consequences. How do you shout that from the rooftops? How do you drain a hole in the Tea Party brain and pour that wisdom down it? Mother Nature is doing it for us. Severe weather conditions are but a start.
Hurricane Irene Eats Up My Santogold Saturday
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