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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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