CLIMATE CHANGE AND TEXAS FLOODS

In Texas floods, is there a link to climate change?

John Neilsen-Gammon, June 2, 2015 (The Conversation)

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“…Thermodynamically, there’s a limit to how much water vapor can be carried by the air…Studies have shown the odds of very intense rainfall in this part of the country have gone up substantially over last century. The cause and effect with climate change and surface temperature is fairly direct. There’s definitely a connection there…It depends on how you measure drought. The biggest factor driving drought in Texas and the Great Plains in general is rising temperatures. It’s not clear yet whether the rising temperatures are going to outpace the increase in rainfall that’s been observed to lead to more or less drought overall…

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“…[C]limate change is going to make temperatures warmer, make evaporation more intense and increase water demand for plants and agriculture, so it will make that aspect of drought worse. But it remains to be seen whether droughts overall will become worse, because that depends on rainfall…[Y]ou do end up getting more extremes…[T]hey can be extremely damaging…Extremely damaging events are droughts, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes…In the case of heavy local rainfall, trends have been detected and the models predict an increasing trend…[but] event attribution is a still an immature science…” click here for more

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