Revelations: When the Levee Breaks

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Harvey’s Mammoth Deluge Potential: Some Models Are Showing Storm Could Produce Five Feet of Rain

During recent years, a warmer than normal atmosphere has been producing more and more intense rain storms. The number of record daily rainfall instances around the world has been rising precipitously (see image above). This increasing severity is, in large part, due to the fact that human-forced warming amps up the hydrological cycle — producing more intense rain storms and more intense droughts. In other words, the climate dice are loaded for extreme rainfall and droughts in the present atmosphere. And it is in this atmosphere that Harvey has emerged….

The Relationship Between Hurricanes and Climate Change

The most recent draft of a sweeping climate science report pulled together by 13 federal agencies as part of the National Climate Assessment suggested that the science linking hurricanes to climate change was still emerging. Looking back through the history of storms, “the trend signal has not yet had time to rise above the background variability of natural processes,” the report states.

Temperatures have been rising, and theory and computer modeling suggest an increase in storm intensity in a warmer world, “and the models generally show an increase in the number of very intense” storms.

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