This was the header of an NPR dump into the weekend news void:
Angel Portillo doesn't think about climate change much. It's not that he doesn't care. He just has other things to worry about. Climate change seems so far away, so big.
Lately though, Portillo says he has been thinking about it more often.
Standing on the banks of a swollen and surging Arkansas River, just upriver from a cluster of flooded businesses and homes, it's easy to see why.
"Stuff like this," he says, nodding at the frothy brown waters, "all of the tornadoes that have been happening — it just doesn't seem like a coincidence, you know?"
A string of natural disasters has hit the Central U.S. in recent weeks. Tornadoes have devastated communities, tearing up trees and homes. Record rainfall has prevented countless farmers from planting crops. Rising rivers continue to flood fields, inundate homes and threaten aging levees from Iowa to Mississippi.
And while none of these events can be directly attributed to climate change, extreme rains are happening more frequently in many parts of the U.S. and that trend is expected to continue as the Earth continues to warm.
Got Food?
You don’t have to look far to see evidence that something is happening; Auntie B found it just driving around and doing a little digging — Climate Crisis Comes Home to Roost in the Midwest.
Even if their farms dry out enough to plant corn in another week or two, the growing season is now so short that it won’t be worth the time, seed and effort because the yields will be so small.
It’’s not just the midwest that’s in trouble — via WBUR, NPR’s Here & Now also has a report on how Mississippi Delta Farmers Wither Under Weight Of 4-Month Flood.
About a quarter million acres of fertile farmland in the Mississippi Delta have been underwater since February. Some farmers haven't planted a single crop this year, and their losses will likely be devastating to the local economy. Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd explains why the water hasn't receded and how farmers are responding to yet another challenge to their livelihoods.
'I Tried To Stay And Hold On As Long As I Could': Returning To A Flooded Mississippi Home tells the story of a man trying to cope with disaster — part of which is attributed to disagreements over the infrastructure needed to cope. Beyond the personal tragedy is the larger picture.
Jones lives near the small town of Filter, Mississippi, a community of farms in an area known as the Yazoo Backwater where soybeans and corn would normally be growing tall this time of year. The water has changed all that. Many farmers will go the entire season without planting a crop for the first time in their careers.
The deluge has destroyed homes and livelihoods up and down the Mississippi River this spring. Gauges near Vicksburg, Mississippi, have been above flood levels for 110 days. The river hasn't been this high for this long since 1927.
“Never Tell Me The Odds” — Wait; What ARE the Odds?
When '1-In-100-Year' Floods Happen Often, What Should You Call Them? The new normal is confusing, because we expect a “100 year flood” should only happen once in a century. It turns out that is the wrong way to think about it.
...While it's unlikely that two large storms that cause flooding will happen in close succession, it's not impossible.
A 1-in-100-year storm has a 1% chance of happening every year.
"As with the flip of a coin, if you flip heads twice in a row, that doesn't mean you'll flip tails the next time," Hill says. "So you could have three very significant floods right in a row."
And, studies say, there is a better way to communicate that reality, by telling people what their risk of flooding is over time rather than each year.
For example, if there is a 1% chance that a home will flood each year, that means there's a 26% chance it will flood over the course of a 30-year mortgage.
emphasis added
The change in Climate Change is another way of saying the odds are changing.
Weather is about events; climate is about the probability of those events happening in a given place at a given time.
This is one of things that makes attributing some single event to climate change tricky. You can’t predict an individual coin flip going either way, only how likely it is — but if the long term trend over multiple coin flips shows heads starting to come up more and more often than you expect, it’s time to recognize you’re playing a new game.
Do you feel lucky?
Denial as a policy is not working.
The DNC is terrified of talking about it.
"While climate change is at the top of our list, the DNC will not be holding entire debates on a single issue area because we want to make sure voters have the ability to hear from candidates on dozens of issues of importance to American voters," the DNC said.
The White House is blocking testimony about it.
WASHINGTON - White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week warning that human-caused climate change is “possibly catastrophic.” The move came after State officials refused to excise the document’s references to federal scientific findings on climate change.
The effort to edit, and ultimately suppress, the prepared testimony by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research comes as President Donald Trump’s administration is debating how best to challenge the fact that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet and could pose serious risks unless the world makes deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. Senior military and intelligence officials have continued to warn that climate change could undermine U.S. national security - a position Trump rejects.
Wonder why they don’t want anyone to hear about it?
The document sounds the alarms on several fronts, outlining two dozen different ways that “climate-linked stresses” could affect human society. It identifies nine tipping points that could transform the Earth’s system, including “rapid melting in west Antarctic or Greenland ice masses” along with “rapid die-offs of many critically important species, such as coral or insects” and a “massive release of carbon” from methane that is now frozen in the earth. It warns that because scientists have not been able to calculate the likelihood of these thresholds being reached, “crossing them is possible over any future timeframe.”
The prepared testimony also says 18 of the past 20 years have ranked as the warmest on record, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “and the last five years have been the warmest five.”
The White House proposed eliminating all of these scientific references
emphasis added
Congressman Paul Tonko (D-NY 20) had this to say about President Trump’s recent remarks on climate:
“When the leader of the nation and free world is willing to broadcast total rejection of climate science and unawareness of what's going on around us, we are tarnishing the image of a nation,” Tonko, D-N.Y., told the Washington Examiner. “It’s borderline criminal negligence.”
Tonko is the usually mild-mannered chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee that handles environment and climate change.
It is now beyond borderline criminal negligence. At this point it’s active malfeasance with Trump’s move to block testimony and suppress science.
It may be cold comfort for Al Gore, but the way things are speeding up, he’ll be able to tell you “I told you so” a lot sooner than seemed likely even five years ago.