XPost: alt.global-warming, talk.politics.guns, sac.politics
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
In article <t0qp91$2k7gp$
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Flood drown fags. Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain rain rain.
When the big flood comes, it will threaten millions of people,
the world's fifth-largest economy and an area that produces a
quarter of the nation's food. Parts of California's capital will
be underwater. The state's crop-crossed Central Valley will be
an inland sea.
The scenario, dubbed the "ARkStorm scenario" by researchers from
the U.S. Geological Survey's Multi Hazards Demonstration
Project, is an eventuality. It will happen, according to new
research.
The study, published in Science Advances, is part of a larger
scientific effort to prepare policymakers and California for the
state's "other Big One" � a cataclysmic flood event that experts
say could cause more than a million people to flee their homes
and nearly $1 trillion worth of damage. And human-caused climate
change is greatly increasing the odds, the research finds.
"Climate change has probably already doubled the risk of an
extremely severe storm sequence in California, like the one in
the study," says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the
University of California Los Angeles and a co-author of the
study. "But each additional degree of warming is going to
further increase that risk further."
Historically, sediment surveys show that California has
experienced major widespread floods every one to two hundred
years. The last one was in 1862. It killed thousands of people,
destroyed entire towns and bankrupted the state.
"It's kind of like a big earthquake," Swain says. "It's
eventually going to happen."
The Great Flood of 1862 was fueled by a large snowpack and a
series of atmospheric rivers � rivers of dense moisture in the
sky. Scientists predict that atmospheric rivers, like
hurricanes, are going to become stronger as the climate warms.
Warmer air holds more water.
Swain and his co-author Xingying Huang used new weather modeling
and expected climate scenarios to look at two scenarios: What a
similar storm system would look like today, and at the end of
the century.
They found that existing climate change � the warming that's
already happened since 1862 � makes it twice as likely that a
similar scale flood occurs today. In future, hotter scenarios,
the storm systems grow more frequent and more intense. End-of-
the-century storms, they found, could generate 200-400 percent
more runoff in the Sierra Nevada Mountains than now.
Future iterations of the research, Swain says, will focus on
what that increased intensity means on the ground � what areas
will flood and for how long.
The last report to model what an ARkStorm scenario would look
like was published in 2011. It found that the scale of the
flooding and the economic fallout would affect every part of the
state and cause three times as much damage as a 7.8 earthquake
on the San Andreas fault. Relief efforts would be complicated by
road closures and infrastructure damage. Economic fallout would
be felt globally.
Swain says that California has been behind the curve in dealing
with massive climate-fueled wildfires, and can't afford to lag
on floods too.
"We still have some amount of time to prepare for catastrophic
flood risks."
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/12/1117161878/a-cataclysmic-flood-is- coming-for-california-climate-change-makes-it-more-likely
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