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US Faces More Frequent Extreme Weather 07/09 06:17
WASHINGTON (AP) -- After deadly flooding in central Texas in 1987, some
thought they'd proven they could handle Mother Nature's best punch. Then came
this month's horrific flash floods, when unfathomable amounts of rain fell in
only hours and more than 100 people died.
Before 2021, the typically temperate Pacific Northwest and western Canada
seemed highly unlikely to get a killer heat wave, but they did. Tropical Hawaii
once felt an ocean away from drought-fueled wildfires, until it wasn't. And
many in inland North Carolina figured hurricanes were a coastal problem until
the remnants of Helene blew in last year.
Climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent and intense,
according to climate scientists and government data. But people and governments
are generally living in the past and haven't embraced that extreme weather is
now the norm, to say nothing about preparing for the nastier future that's in
store, experts in meteorology, disasters and health told The Associated Press.
"What happens with climate change is that what used to be extreme becomes
average, typical, and what used to never occur in a human lifetime or maybe
even in a thousand years becomes the new extreme," Princeton University climate
scientist Michael Oppenheimer said. "We start to experience things that just
basically never happened before."
The 10-year summer average of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's climate extreme index, which tracks hurricanes, heavy rain,
droughts and high and low temperatures, is 58% higher than it was in the 1980s.
Despite the grim trajectory, society isn't acting with enough alarm,
Oppenheimer said.
"There's plenty of evidence that we sit there and do absolutely nothing
while these risks are coming right at us like a moving railroad train and we're
standing in the tracks. And then all of a sudden, bam," he said.
Shifting public perspective
Although the changing climate is the biggest problem, the way we react to or
ignore the changes could make a bad situation worse, experts said.
Marshall Shepherd, a University of Georgia meteorology professor who
previously served as president of the American Meteorological Society, said
people tend to base decisions on how they fared during past extreme weather
events, including storms that didn't end up directly affecting them. This
leaves them overly optimistic that they'll also fare well today, even though
storms have grown more fierce.
He points to the Texas flooding.
"That is flash flood alley. We know that floods happen in that region all
the time. ... I've already seen normalcy bias statements by people in the
regions saying, well, we get flooding all the time," Shepherd said, pointing
out that the amount of rain that fell in only a few hours last week was
anything but normal.
People need to shift how they think about disasters, even if they don't live
in the most disaster-prone locations, said Kim Klockow McClain, an extreme
weather social scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
who studies communicating disaster warnings and risk.
"The message needs to be, if you're used to some degree of nuisance
flooding, every so often, look at what happened in Texas and realize that this
is a shifting baseline," she said.
Ignoring the problem won't make it disappear
Time and again after catastrophic storms and wildfires, people whose lives
were upended say they didn't think it could happen to them. This mindset helps
people cope, but with extreme weather happening more frequently and in more
places, it can prevent them from adequately preparing.
"It's sort of a psychological mechanism to protect us that it can't happen
to me," said Susan Cutter, co-director of the Hazards Vulnerability &
Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina.
Surviving past extreme events can leave people believing that it won't
happen again or, if it does, that they'll be fine, said Lori Peek, director of
the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado. She said this
overconfidence can be dangerous: "Just because I've lived through a fire or a
flood or a hurricane or a tornado, that does not mean that the next time is
going to look like the last time."
What's being done
As the weather has grown more extreme, our ability to prepare for and react
to it hasn't kept pace, the scientists said.
"Infrastructure is aging in our country and is more vulnerable given the
fact that there are just simply, as a matter of fact, more people living in
harm's way," Peek said. "As our population has continued to rise, it's not only
that we have more people in the country, it's also that we have more people
living in particularly hazardous areas like our coastal areas."
The Trump Administration's mass layoffs and planned cuts to agencies that
study climate and help warn of and deal with disasters -- the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, the National Weather Service and research labs at the
National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey --
could further worsen the situation, several experts said.
Smart and experienced people have already left these agencies and it could
take years to make up for their knowledge and abilities, they said.
"We're destroying the capability we have that we're going to need more and
more in the future," Oppenheimer said.
As for future disasters, the country needs to figure out and plan for the
worst-case scenario instead of looking to the past, Peek said.
"This is our future," Peek said. "It's obvious that we're living into a
future where there are going to be more fires and floods and heat waves."
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