Donald Trump and maga Republicans ignore science behind the dangers of flash flooding and Texas deadly disaster was forewarned by history

Echo investigative science report published in The New Yorker magazine, by John Seabrook. This article should be requied reading by all climate change deniers (assuming they can read❗👀📚) and anybody living in an place or area where there is history of flash flooding, regardless of how many years ago the occurance happened.

"One Kerr County, Texas commissioner, H. A. (Buster) Baldwin, said in a 2016, meeting, 'I think this whole thing is a little extravagant for Kerr County.” The potential noise bothered him. He went on, “The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of the night—I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all'. 😢Instead, Camp Mystic relied on a word-of-mouth warning system: camps upriver would phone those downriver if a flood was coming."

In an Age of Climate Change, How Do We Cope with Floods❓
The deaths in the Texas Hill Country are a tragic testament to the force of a raging river. Flood-stricken Vermont has a radical plan to counter the threat it faces.

On the evening of July 3rd, 2025, as the sun went down over Kerrville, Texas, a small city of some twenty-five thousand people and the seat of Kerr County, the water in the Guadalupe River was just four inches deep, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s stream gauge there. The area hadn’t had any rain since mid-June. R.V. campers in the HTR TX Hill Country campground in Kerrville, some of whom had arrived at the sixty-five-acre facility only hours before, could barely hear the river, even though they were parked in premium spots next to it.

At 3:30 A.M. on July 4th, Dalton Rice, the city manager, went out for an early-morning jog along the sluggish waterway. The river had risen to 1.71 feet, around the average depth. Kerrville’s much anticipated “Fourth on the River” celebration at the riverside Louise Hays Park was scheduled for that afternoon, and Rice saw “not a drop of rain” during his run, he later told Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. By 4 A.M., when Rice went home, “there was very light rain,” he said that day. “We did not see any signs of the river rising at that time.”

Rice was apparently unaware that a few hours earlier, at 1:14 A.M., the Austin-San Antonio office of the National Weather Service had sent a flash-flood warning for south-central Kerr County. The area it covered included the town of Hunt, about twelve miles upstream from Kerrville, where Camp Mystic, a girls’ Christian ✝️sleepaway camp, was situated, at the confluence of Cypress Creek and the south fork of the Guadalupe. At 4:03 A.M., the warning was upgraded to an emergency: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!” 

In fact, the stream gauge at Hunt showed the river nearing twenty-two feet, twelve feet higher than its banks. In the next hour, it would rise to thirty-seven feet, at which point the gauge stopped transmitting.

Network-news footage of flood-related disasters has traditionally shown low-lying coastal towns swamped by storm surges from named weather systems, with residents and rescue workers navigating the streets in hip waders, canoes, and powerboats, and the water level sometimes taking days to subside. Houston, New Orleans, Tampa, Charleston, and New York are among the cities that have been inundated in the past three decades. Yet storm-surge-driven inundation flooding is not the deadliest kind of flood. The disaster often unfolds slowly enough that there’s time for many people to get to higher ground—and for weather reporters to get in place. The water isn’t moving anywhere near as fast as that of a flooded river. The flowing water in a mad river reshapes the entire landscape, a process known as fluvial erosion.

The flood barrelling down on Kerr County more resembled a tornado or a wildfire, a volatile, rapidly changing hazard, with a narrow window within which to act before the deadly force of the raging river arrived at your door. The September, 2024, floods that killed a hundred and eight people in the high country of western North Carolina, when Hurricane Helene passed over, were this kind of event, as were the floods in Valencia, Spain, in late October, 2024, which killed two hundred and thirty-two people. The recent flooding in Ruidoso, New Mexico, which claimed three lives, was, too. In my part-time home of Vermont, storms flooded much of the state, including the capital, Montpelier, in July, 2023, and flooding caused by the remnants of Hurricane Beryl hit the town of Plainfield, among other places, in July, 2024. Two people died in each event, and the damage from erosion was severe. The 2023 disaster wasn’t even caused by a named storm. Rain-soaked “thunder boomers” were enough to do the damage.

Historically, this kind of flooding, which often occurs in hilly and mountainous regions, has received far less attention than storm-surge flooding, and local municipalities tend to be less prepared than coastal towns to deal with it. People who have moved away from the beach to escape hurricanes and rising sea levels, and have settled in supposed “climate havens” like Asheville, North Carolina, or Plymouth, Vermont, are reluctant to accept that they have merely traded a devil they know for one they don’t. Francis J. Magilligan, a fluvial geomorphologist at Dartmouth College, told me, “We are actually getting pretty good at figuring out inundation risk. I would say, comparatively, we’re at the starting point of thinking about erosional risk. And we don’t have a good set of tools, FEMA or otherwise, to understand that risk.”

The floodplain maps that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) uses to designate a Special Flood Hazard Area, or S.F.H.A., are based on historical climate and geological data. The maps don’t show the actual boundaries of past floods; rather, they illustrate statistical constructs based on the probability that a flood of a certain magnitude will occur there in a certain time range. The National Flood Insurance Program uses the maps to calculate risk. People who live in a hundred-year floodplain, for example, have a one-per-cent chance of being flooded in any given year. Anyone who builds or buys property in a mapped floodplain must take out federal flood insurance in order to qualify for a mortgage. The maps cover the coastal areas and the borders of major rivers, like the Mississippi, that flood frequently. They often don’t cover mountainous communities with smaller rivers and streams, where flooding can affect not only people living down by a river but also those living on banks high above it, whose homes may be lost to erosion. Moreover, most of the data FEMA uses to designate S.F.H.A.s are based on readings from the nineteen-sixties and earlier—data that climate change has largely rendered obsolete. The language, too, engenders a false sense of confidence. It makes it sound as though a bad flood will occur only once every hundred years, and that’s not the way the statistic is supposed to work.

Flash floods often occur in terrain with steep, narrow valleys that drain into rivers where the water is confined in natural and man-made channels and has nowhere else to go. The trigger is very heavy, concentrated rainfall. Warmer oceans lead to more surface evaporation, and warmer air is capable of carrying more moisture. When the warm air is forced upward by mountains, it cools and loses its ability to retain water, causing a sudden release of rain. With the Valencia floods, a year’s worth of rain fell in a single day. In North Carolina, upward of twelve to fourteen inches of rain fell in several hours. As global temperatures rise, outbursts of extreme precipitation will increase. Carl Renshaw, a hydrologist at Dartmouth, told me, referring to the meteorological conditions that led to the Texas floods, “You’re dumping so much water so quickly because you’ve primed the system with moisture. It’s like loading a gun. The people there had no time.”

Kerr County and its neighbor Kendall County sit in a valley that is known as Flash Flood Alley, because of the speed with which rainfall runs off the cliffs of the Balcones Escarpment and sluices down through streams and rivers to the coastal plain around San Antonio. The hillsides are steep, and the thin, dry topsoil over bedrock retains little water. Major flooding occurs regularly. And yet, even in Flash Flood Alley, which the judge of Kerr County, Rob Kelly, described in a press conference on July 4th as “the most dangerous river valley in the United States,” people continue to build in hundred-year floodplains. When properties are flooded, old-timers and newcomers alike tend to fix things back up. Kimberly Meitzen, a geography professor at Texas State University, in San Marcos, a small city in the Guadalupe River basin, told me, “We have this history of flooding and rebuilding here.” She mentioned five floods within living memory, in 1978, 1987, 1998, 2002, and 2015, in which not just houses but whole neighborhoods were washed away. “They just rebuild,” she said. Moreover, she added, “people continue to request variances to rebuild even closer” to the river. “There’s no really strong regulatory authority to prevent it,” she went on. “And so it just continues to put more people at risk.”

In Vermont, a flood in August, 2011, caused by Hurricane Irene, was so devastating that the U.S. Geological Survey called it a five-hundred-year flood, and at least one analysis deemed it a thousand-year flood. The flood that tore through Plainfield on July 10, 2024, occurred one year to the day after the 2023 flood, which had been a hundred-year one. And, on the same day this July, a violent flood struck Caledonia County, in the north of the state. Although such a tight grouping of floods isn’t statistically impossible, it suggests that the probability curves used by FEMA are out of whack with real climate conditions.

A recent national study commissioned by First Street Foundation, a private risk-assessment firm, concluded that floods previously considered to be hundred-year events have become, on average, sixty-two-year events. (In some places, the estimate is as low as eight years.) The study also found that in Vermont’s Washington County, which includes Montpelier, Plainfield, and the city of Barre, more than forty-eight hundred properties (out of nearly thirty thousand total properties) are at high risk of flooding, yet FEMA includes fewer than fifteen hundred of those properties on its special-flood-hazard maps. Nationally, the study found that 17.7 million properties are at risk of flooding, but only about five million properties are in a FEMA flood-hazard zone. That means that millions of home buyers and owners are making decisions with an incomplete understanding of the true physical and financial risks they face. Jeremy Porter, the head of climate-implications research at First Street, told me, “Ultimately, what you end up doing is systematically underestimating flood risk.”

Vermont feels like the frontier of climate change in the Northeast. Farmers in the bottomlands, who previously planted wheat and barley, are beginning to plant rice, which can be underwater for two days without damage to the crop. The old roads that early Vermont settlers hacked out on hilltops, which lasted for more than two hundred years, are melting back into the forest. Extreme-rain events scour the roads down to bedrock ledges, rendering them impassable, and, because no one then uses them, any blown-down trees don’t get cleared. The next storm brings more blowdowns. A road that I went mountain biking on ten years ago, when it was a distinct pathway with old-growth trees on each side, lined by aged stone walls, is now such a tangle of fallen trees, branches, and rocks that it’s hard to tell a road was ever there.

Vermont is the second least populated state, after Wyoming, with fewer than six hundred and fifty thousand residents; it is also the fourth highest in disaster-relief funding per capita, nearly all of it flood-related. Washington County ranked first nationally in disaster declarations between 2011 and 2024. Annual precipitation in the state has increased six inches since the nineteen-sixties, and heavier-than-normal rain events in the Northeast are expected to increase by as much as fifty-two per cent by 2100. Vermont is a laboratory for the study of intense rainfall in steep terrain, and a proving ground for scientists, policymakers, regulators, and land-use planners who are on the front lines of a recurring catastrophe that traditional methods of prevention—dredging a river’s bottom, armoring its sides, berming its banks—have only made worse.

Kevin Geiger, a land-use planner with the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission, in Woodstock, Vermont, told me that the first step in designing a sustainable flood-prevention program is “believing that the flood will come.” He went on, “Until you do that, nothing else follows. Why would we tell a person they can’t build there? Why would a town need to have a rescue boat? Why would we put in a system with sirens, unless you believe in the flood?” He added, “But believing in the flood means being constantly worried. And that’s not a good condition. People don’t want to live that way.”

Geiger and I were driving west on Route 4, toward the town of Bridgewater. Like all Vermont roads, Route 4 is built to withstand twenty-five-year floods. In 2011 and again in 2023, the Ottauquechee River, now burbling charmingly just below the roadway, tore away large sections of this vital artery across central Vermont and wiped out homes and businesses. In 2011, the floodwaters sent the Dead River Company’s propane tanks hurtling downstream, where they leaked gas and tumbled over three dams. That year, the iron-truss bridge in Woodstock was destroyed and never rebuilt, and the covered bridge in Taftsville was severely damaged. The Quechee covered bridge had to be replaced.

Geiger pointed out structures near the river that won’t survive the next flood, or the one after that. “I’m like that kid in the movie who sees dead people,” he said, “except I see flooded houses. I just drive around and go, ‘Oh, that one’s a goner. It hasn’t happened yet, but . . .’ ” The only real solution, he said, was to buy those property owners out. In most such buyouts, FEMA will pay seventy-five per cent of the estimated pre-flood value of a property. About two hundred owners have taken buyouts in Vermont since Irene. (State and local agencies will usually make up the remaining twenty-five per cent.) But anyone who takes a buyout still needs to find housing, and Vermont is already dealing with an affordable-housing crisis that keeps young people from moving to the state. And buyouts mean that towns’ tax bases decrease, bringing in less money to apply to future floods. Bridgewater went more than five million dollars in debt from roadwork related to the 2023 flood. Although the town has finally begun to recover that money from FEMA, the six-per-cent interest it has been paying on its loan is not recoverable.

Before Geiger joined Two Rivers, he was briefly a firefighter in Zion National Park, in Utah, and he brings an emergency worker’s mind-set to flooding. “The fire department thinks your house is going to burn down, right?” he said. “The reason the fire department exists is they believe that things are going to burn.” But there is no equivalent of a fire department in flood response. That’s because, Geiger continued, “we don’t believe in floods the same way. We don’t practice for them.” He glanced over at the Ottauquechee. “Maybe it’s because fires don’t have a benign state like rivers do. Today the river is happy.”

Geiger went on, “Given the money that’s available, we can do a buyout here and there, or we could do a floodplain restoration, or maybe, you know, we could take out a bridge. But it’s nibbling at the problem.” He estimates that it would take thirty billion dollars to flood-proof Vermont, which would include moving crucial infrastructure away from the river and buying out hundreds if not thousands of property owners. “That’s moving a bunch of Montpelier and Barre,” he said. Only the federal government could afford that, and earlier this year President Donald Trump threatened to shut down FEMA and make the states responsible for disaster relief.

Geiger told me, “I say about these flooding events, ‘That wasn’t the movie. That was only the trailer. The movie is still in production.’ ”

Kerr County, like much of the Hill Country of central Texas, has grown steadily in population in recent years. Well-to-do families have attractive “river houses” with long green lawns that slope down to stands of cypress trees at the river’s edge. Visitors flock to barbecue joints, authentic country inns, and R.V. parks that are situated next to the river. At the HTR TX Hill Country campground, pitches for tents could be booked on a small island near the confluence of the north and south forks of the river. But all this development has often meant that riparian borders (in this case, the wooded land adjoining the river), which can slow a flood down, have been fragmented.

Subdivisions and housing developments have sprouted up, and more homes and businesses have been built in the floodplain. ⚠️

Many visitors, and newcomers who have bought vacation homes and invested in rental properties along the river, may well have had a limited understanding of the history of flooding in the upper basin; the last major flood in Kerrville occurred in 2002. After previous floods, some property owners put their houses on raised foundations and stilts, unwittingly making them even more vulnerable. On July 4th, the Guadalupe easily plucked these structures off their pillars.

Children’s summer camps are also situated all along the river’s upper basin. One of the oldest is Hunt’s Camp Mystic, founded in 1926. According to records from a state inspection on July 2nd, three hundred and eighty-six campers, and sixty-four counsellors, were staying in the camp’s Guadalupe location that week. Much of the camp property lies within FEMA’s hundred-year floodplain. The cabins for junior campers—the Bubble Inn, the Wiggle Inn, the Giggle Box, and the Twins I and II—were on lower-lying land, with some of them in a “floodway,” where new development is supposed to be severely restricted, and which Kerr County defines as “an extremely hazardous area due to the velocity of floodwaters which carry debris, potential projectiles and erosion potential.” Even so, Camp Mystic never had to reposition these cabins. (Indeed, as the Associated Press first reported, it made several successful appeals to FEMA to have some camp buildings removed from S.F.H.A. maps.)

Before the morning of July 4th, the upper river basin had experienced numerous floods, including the disaster in 1987, which killed ten teen-agers, whose bus was cut off by water while they were trying to flee a camp downriver, in Comfort, and the one in 2015, which killed thirteen people and wiped out much of the town of Wimberley, eighty miles east of Kerrville. And yet Judge Kelly, the county’s highest-ranking elected official, said in his July 4th remarks, “We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here, none whatsoever.”

The flash-flood warning that the National Weather Service sent at 1:14 A.M. on July 4th went over the Wireless Emergency Alerts system, which allows government agencies to push alerts to all major cellular carriers’ subscribers whose phones are in a designated area. Almost everyone with a cellphone in Kerr County should have received the message. Camp Mystic’s longtime executive director, Dick Eastland, got that alert, but the evacuation didn’t begin until 2:30 A.M.

Spotty cell coverage could explain why the warning at 1:14 and the upgraded emergency notification at 4:03 weren’t heeded by some Kerr County residents and officials. But even if the out-of-towners from Austin, Dallas, and beyond in the campgrounds along the river did receive these alerts on their phones, how many of them would have fully grasped the danger? According to the Times, the owner of the Blue Oak R.V. Park, Lorena Guillen, who bought the business four years ago, called the Kerr County sheriff’s office at 2:08 A.M. to ask if she should be concerned. She said that the person who answered the phone had no information about any flooding.

Many people simply ignored the warnings, or had their phones silenced or turned off. Larry Leitha, the sheriff of Kerr County, wasn’t awakened until around five-thirty. One commenter on Reddit’s Texas forum wrote after the flood, “We get so many ‘flash flood’ warnings which end up being water on the roadway that clears quickly after the rain stops. No one thought it meant 30 feet of water coming.” In addition to weather-related alerts, Texans receive Amber Alerts for missing children, Silver Alerts for missing seniors, Blue Alerts for suspects of violence against police, and CLEAR Alerts for missing adults in danger. Researchers have cautioned that people may become so desensitized to warnings that there’s no benefit to them. A 2024 RAND report found that thirty per cent of Texans opted out of emergency alerts, the highest rate in the nation. (Vermont had the lowest.) Kerr County has a CodeRED alert system for emergencies, but emergency officials didn’t make use of it in time.

Sirens, on the other hand, do get people’s attention. 

Eighteen miles downriver from Kerrville, in the town of Comfort, where four hundred people lost their homes in the 1978, flood, a siren system was recently installed. On July 4th, the sirens sounded at 10:52 A.M., giving people time to find higher ground. (They also had the added advantage of daylight and, for some, the knowledge of what was happening upstream.) “People knew that if they heard the siren, they gotta get out,” Danny Morales, the assistant chief of the Comfort Volunteer Fire Department, told NBC.

After the 2015, flood, Kerr County, which has an annual budget of sixty-seven million dollars, considered installing a siren system for the towns upriver. It would have cost the county about a million dollars. But, after much debate, county officials decided against it. One commissioner, H. A. (Buster) Baldwin, said in a 2016, meeting, “I think this whole thing is a little extravagant for Kerr County.” The potential noise bothered him. He went on, “The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of the night—I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.” Instead, Camp Mystic relied on a word-of-mouth warning system: camps upriver would phone those downriver if a flood was coming.

On a humid Saturday in late May, at the start of blackfly season in Vermont, I went to Plainfield to meet Mike Kline, a river scientist from nearby Middlesex, and George Springston, a local geologist who studies landslides. We walked along the Great Brook, the ordinarily placid and beguiling waterway that runs through the center of town. Of all the flood-damaged Vermont municipalities, Plainfield (population 1,236) is a poster child for the traditional, costly, and ultimately self-defeating flood-prevention practices. These include straightening and dredging rivers to allow for better navigation and more flow to power mills, and hardening the sides of streams and rivers with crushed stone and boulders known as riprap, to protect roads, railroad tracks, buildings, and other infrastructure from a river’s tendency to meander, which is what rivers in their natural state do. Rivers want to move; it’s part of the physics of flow and sediment transport. Unrestrained by human engineering, a river moves in a sinuous pattern that balances erosion and sedimentation.

But many rivers aren’t allowed to move laterally. They are straightened and “channelized” so that they remain in one place. During an extreme-rainfall event, the force of the water cascading down these straightened sluices meets with no resistance from meanders, and a river often has no way of reaching its floodplains—frequently now developed—which could absorb and store some runoff. The powerful flow scours valley walls, causing landslides, and finally inundates downstream places like Montpelier, Barre, and Waterbury, at which point it becomes the kind of flood you see on TV. Construction crews then re-dredge the river and re-armor its sides, insuring that the hydrological conditions that caused the flooding will be the same, or worse, the next time.

“What we’re seeing here are the consequences of actions taken fifty years ago,” Springston said, “after the no-name flood of 1973.” That flood, coming after four relatively quiet decades, marked the beginning of the current era of extreme-precipitation events. Workers dredged the Great Brook afterward, using bulldozers to clear unsightly logjams (which can act as natural flood barriers), and rechannelled the stream. “I’ve told many folks,” Springston said, gesturing toward the wreckage, “this is payback from ’73. We’ve had a series of damaging floods since. We’re doing what doesn’t work over and over again.”

After the 2023, and 2024, floods, Vermont was able to muster the political will to break away from the traditional approach, and to begin managing its rivers in a more sustainable and less risky way. Mike Kline, more than anyone, is the man who made this happen. Kline is the driving force behind Vermont’s 2024, Flood Safety Act, a radical, first-in-the-nation law that gives the state jurisdiction over Vermont’s twenty-three thousand miles of streams and rivers. Beginning in 2028, when the new regulations take effect, Vermont’s rivers will be managed not as channels but as “corridors,” which will comprise all the land within the river’s natural meander pattern, plus fifty feet of riparian borders on both banks. The river will have the freedom to move and reconnect to floodplains. Riverside property owners will no longer have the automatic right to armor banks; in some cases they must allow the river to meander, even if that means it meanders through their land.

The river-corridor idea derived from what Kline calls a eureka moment, which he experienced in a river-science course he took in Colorado in 1999. The instructor had been discussing the concept of dynamic equilibrium in river management, which holds that healthy rivers with free meander patterns can achieve the right balance of sediment transport and riverbed stability to keep them from turning destructive. “I remember it very distinctly,” Kline said. “It’s, like, Oh, my gosh, if we can calculate all this mathematically, and it’s science-based, we can draw a river corridor and say, ‘Here’s our planning tool. This is how much room, at the minimum, the river needs to get to its least erosive form.’ ” He then spent the next twenty-five years trying to get Vermont land-use planners and lawmakers to listen to him. A lot of destruction had to occur first, but eventually they did.

I asked how the idea would work in practice, since so much critical infrastructure has been built in river corridors. Kline pointed to a spot where the Great Brook had eroded a large chunk of its bank. He told me, “If a landowner who owned this land said, ‘I want to come in and put my farm road back here and move the stream,’ they would be denied a permit. But as soon as there’s public infrastructure involved, or it’s a public-safety concern, the regulations get set aside.” Although the Flood Safety Act gives the state authority over river corridors, it also includes a provision that grants exceptions to the law in cases of compelling public interest. Kline said, “We didn’t think we had the political base to say that even the public infrastructure is subject to this law, and that, ultimately, it’s in society’s best interest to let this occur”—that is, to abandon the roads to the rivers.

Together with Springston, we continued walking along the Great Brook, which joins the Winooski River just south of the center of Plainfield. Springston pointed out debris that remained scattered around after last year’s flood. There was a concrete pipe that used to be part of the town’s sewage system, a section of a bridge that the stream had taken out, and the remains of the Heartbreak Hotel, a storied old apartment building, half of which washed into the river on the night of July 10th. The people living there got out in time, but their cats didn’t.

Both Kline and Kevin Geiger spoke about how Vermont’s recent series of floods have compressed geological time into human-scale time. Fluvial erosion has begun to form whole new valleys in spots like Plymouth, where Money Brook, previously a tiny rivulet, has sliced a deep trench in the hillside. But the most dramatic example of valley formation I saw was in Plainfield. The terrace on which the road out of town once sat was completely gone, and several hundred yards of road were gone with it. The brook had left its channel and begun a new channel across the valley. “It totally switched sides of the valley bottom,” Kline said, pleased. “This is the river corridor in action.”

The traditional approach to flooding in Vermont, which is to put the river and the road back in place and hope that the problem doesn’t return, was unthinkable in Plainfield. I have been in Vermont during all the major floods going back to ’73, and I’ve seen how violent normally gentle brooks can turn, but I had never seen anything like what we were looking at now, from the edge of a cliff where the road had been. This wasn’t just the trailer, to borrow Geiger’s analogy.

More than two dozen young girls and two counsellors are known to have died at Camp Mystic. All the girls were eight and nine years old. After finally deciding to evacuate, Dick Eastland, the camp’s executive director, and his son, Edward, had attempted to drive to the lowest-lying cabins to help, but the waters rapidly rose. Edward survived by clinging to a tree along with ten or so girls. His father was discovered in a car with three girls he’d been trying to save, and he died shortly afterward. No survivors from the Bubble Inn were found. Heartbreaking pictures of the flooded cabins showed stuffed animals that had escaped the torrent, though their owners hadn’t.

Over all, a hundred and thirty-five fatalities have been confirmed, more than a hundred of them in Kerr County alone, where three people are still missing. A sizable number of the victims were likely staying in the R.V. parks and campgrounds along the river. All thirty-three of the R.V.s in the Blue Oak park were taken by the river. Nearly everyone who was staying in the R.V.s managed to make it out, but four members of a family that was camping on the site’s island drowned. At the neighboring HTR TX Hill Country campground, more than twenty people died or were declared missing, many of them washed away in their R.V.s or in cabins.

In the aftermath, many questioned whether the cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the N.W.S. delayed the emergency response. Joe Friday, a former director of the N.W.S., wrote on Facebook that “the loss of senior, experienced people may have made it more difficult to get the information the ‘last mile’ to the individuals in danger.” The N.W.S.’s local warning-coördination meteorologist, Paul Yura, who had been pushed by DOGE into early retirement in April, would perhaps have been the person who made the officials of Kerr County realize that the rising waters were a big deal.

Meitzen, the Texas geography professor, told me that Vermont’s Flood Safety Act was “a great example of how so many of our river corridors across the nation, across the world, should be managed.” But the upper basin of the Guadalupe is almost all privately owned, and in Texas the property owner is king. “So that’s a really big challenge to land management in this environment,” she said. Some property owners might take buyouts, but people who earn a living from riverside vacation rentals would be giving up long-term income.

In Vermont, the rivers make their way through topsoil and clay, which are easily eroded by the movement of the water, but the Guadalupe’s meanders and straight reaches are entrenched in bedrock. Fluvial erosion, which Vermont’s river-corridor management is aimed at specifically, plays out in a different way in the upper basin. “I mean, these river valleys are carved by these large floods,” Meitzen said. “When you’re in the river valley, it’s full of giant boulders and cobbles that have been moved by large events. Those events form the rapids that everybody has so much fun playing on, and scour out the iconic pools that everybody likes to swing off of a cypress tree and jump into. These features are carved by these incredibly devastating events. People don’t understand that.” Flooding is an unavoidable part of the river’s life cycle, as is made clear in James C. Scott’s recent book, “In Praise of Floods.” Scott writes, “From a long-run hydrological perspective, it is just the river breathing deeply, as it must.” The question is, how do we live with floods in an era of climate change?

One measure, Meitzen said, would be to “remove buildings from the floodplain—residential houses, tourist houses, these camps, R.V. parks. Then we could help to really eliminate a lot of the loss of life that occurs during these events. But, you know, everybody’s talking about building back. ‘We will build back, we will rebuild.’ ”

A new, more accurate set of climate-related data is supposedly coming from NOAA, as part of its Atlas 15 project, which will presumably allow for a more realistic mapping of the risk of living near rivers throughout the United States. (Other risks, such as taking the subway in New York during the second-highest amount of rain in an hour ever recorded at Central Park, as occurred last week, will be harder to calculate.) Whether FEMA will even be around to deploy the maps is an open question. President Trump had previously said he would like to close the agency by the end of this year’s hurricane season.

For his part, the President has been calling the Texas floods “a hundred-year catastrophe.” On July 6th, he said, “They said once in a hundred years—they’ve never seen anything like this,” implying that there’s nothing anyone could have done, and that it won’t happen again in our lifetime. Until it does. ♦

This article has been updated to include revised figures for the number of missing in Kerr County.

Texas are dying premature death caused by extreme heat

File this under "What Texas Governor Greg Abbott needs to know".

Echo report published in The Texas Tribune by Erin Douglas.

Firefighter and EMT William Dorsey lifts a migrant woman suffering from heat exhaustion onto a stretcher near the border city of Eagle Pass on Saturday. A stifling June heat wave in Texas has caused deaths and hospitalizations across the state. Credit: REUTERS/Kaylee Greenlee Beal

Emergency room visits surge, Texans die amid dangerous heat wave. After weeks of extreme heat, Texas health officials have reported numerous deaths, while emergency departments across the state are seeing record numbers of people seeking treatment for heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

A dangerous heat wave that blanketed Texas this month has prompted a public health crisis that’s particularly affecting older people and outdoor workers across the state, local and federal health data shows.

At least nine people have died from the heat in one South Texas county, the local medical examiner reported, eight of them older than 60. In sweltering Texas prisons, at least nine inmates, including two men in their 30s, have died of heart attacks or unknown causes in facilities that lack air conditioning.

And in one particularly harrowing incident, a 14-year-old boy and his stepfather, 31, died after hiking in Big Bend National Park last Friday. The stepfather died after crashing his car as he raced to get help after the boy lost consciousness on the trail, while the boy’s 21-year-old brother attempted to carry him back to the trailhead on a day when temperatures in the area reached as high as 119 degrees, according to the National Park Service.

The unrelenting 100-degree temperatures across the state shattered weather records this month amid a heat wave that’s stretching into its fourth week in some parts of Texas. The heat dome is moving east, so Texans could finally see some relief after weeks of oppressive heat.

Such heat waves and the record-breaking temperatures they bring are becoming more common and severe due to climate change, scientists told The Texas Tribune.

Emergency department visits related to the heat also surged across Texas this month as alarmed medical examiners and local public health officials alike are warning residents about health risks from the life-threatening heat.

Heat is one of the most dangerous types of weather, typically killing more people annually in the U.S. than hurricanes, tornadoes or flooding.

“Heat waves can have a significant impact on human health,” said Jesse Berman, an environmental epidemiologist and an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota. He said the public should keep in mind that although the heat might not seem deadly, it’s just as dangerous as other types of extreme weather.

“Heat waves don’t have that major visible impact the way a hurricane or tornado can, but they certainly have major impacts on population in a sneakier way,” Berman said.

A dangerous heat wave blanketed Texas in June 2023. 

Thousands of Texans have sought emergency medical care in June related to the heat, data from the Texas Department of State Health Services and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. Only about half of health facilities report heat-related illness data to the state’s health department, meaning the real toll on Texans’ health is almost certainly much worse.

In the last two weeks, a CDC region that includes Texas and the states that border it set three new daily records for the number of heat-related emergency department visits since 2017, the first year for which data is available, according to the CDC.

On June 20, for example, more than 1,100 people per 100,000 emergency department visits were treated for heat-related illness by emergency departments in Texas and its neighboring states, a record high for the region.

Texas’ state health department does not yet have complete data on how many Texans died from the heat this month. Lara Anton, senior press officer for DSHS, said the state will likely have a more complete picture of the human toll from the heat wave in about six weeks.

In Webb County, where nine people have been pronounced dead due to the heat, the chief medical examiner, Dr. Corinne Stern, begged the public to take precautions at a commissioners court meeting in Laredo earlier this week.

“This is heat like we’ve not seen here before,” Stern said. “Deaths ruled by heat stroke are ruled accidents, and accidents by definition are preventable.

“All of these deaths could have been prevented,” she added.

Stern said for each of the nine deaths reported in Webb County this month, she heard family and friends recount how their loved one claimed they’d be okay because they’d endured the heat in the border community many times, or how the deceased person had meant to fix their air conditioning but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

The early-in-the-season heat wave likely left people underprepared, she said.

“Our county was caught a little off guard,” Stern told the commissioners. “These high temperatures are higher than what we normally see, and I think many of us thought, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be another couple hot weeks in our county.’”

Dr. Richard Chamberlain, Laredo’s health director, said that emergency responders noted that the patients’ homes were “extremely hot” or that the individual had worked outdoors prior to returning home.

Hospital Visits Soar, Cooling Centers Open In Searing Texas Heat Wave

“It’s an unfortunate situation — any loss of life that is abrupt is concerning,” Chamberlain said. “Myself and members of the community have become very concerned.”

In Hidalgo County, which includes McAllen, emergency rooms are swarming with workers suffering from heat exhaustion and other complications related to the high temperatures. Dr. Iván Meléndez, the health authority for Hidalgo County, estimated about 15-20% of the emergency department patients he’s admitted in recent weeks had medical complications related to heat.

For example, Melendez said, he saw a handful of patients this week with heart failure after drinking too much water “because it’s so damn hot.” And about a quarter of the psychiatric patients he admitted this month were those who became aggressive or violent, a symptom he attributed to the heat.

“When the temperature goes up, you see a lot more hostility, assaults, aggression and domestic violence,” Melendez said.

Melendez said that when he was growing up in Hidalgo County in the 1960s, his family didn’t have air conditioning, so they used fans and water to cool their rooms. Now, he said, “it’s impossible. There’s no way you’re going to sleep without an air conditioner.”

In Dallas County, a handful of people with heat exhaustion and heat stroke began to appear in emergency departments in early June.

But by the middle of the month, dozens of people were being rushed to medical help per day. On one particularly hot day when temperatures reached almost 100 degrees, more than 40 people in Dallas County sought emergency care for heat exhaustion or heat stroke, data from hospitals and the Dallas County medical examiner’s office shows.

In the last two weeks alone, roughly 130 people in Dallas County were treated by emergency departments for heat-related illness, county data shows. That’s more than double the number of cases the county had in all of June last year.

Most of the patients in Dallas were men between the ages of 18 and 44, data shows. Christian Grisales, a public information officer for Dallas County Health & Human Services, said that indicates most patients were likely exposed to the heat during the workday.

“We are encouraging the community to take [the heat] seriously because the heat can kill them,” he said.

Dallas County offers a program to assist low-income households with fixing air-conditioning units or providing air-conditioning window units. “We give priority to the elderly, disabled and families with small children,” Grisales said.

In Southeast Houston, some residents are taking precautions to avoid the emergency room. Erandi Treviño, 31, said that she’s waking up two hours earlier than usual to tend to the nursery that she owns, so that she can avoid the hottest part of the day. 

Even so, last weekend while she was working in the greenhouse, she said she quickly began to fall ill.

“I thought I was going to have a panic attack because of how hot it felt,” said Treviño. “It was hard to take a deep breath.”

Treviño, who is also a coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force, an environmental organization that advocates for better air quality, added that she’s also concerned about the health impact of high ozone levels in the Houston area during the heat wave. 

Heat exacerbates ozone pollution.

Another crack in the Republican political veneer- Senator McConnell protested

Senator Mitch McConnell is loosing credibility even at his Alma mater in Louisville KY 

Republicans finally began to part with stupid Donald Trump by not supporting his expensive and inefficient border wall.

Now, protesters at Republican Senator McConnell's hometown University of Louisville, where he is among the alumni, have publicly demonstrated against him because of his support for fossil fuels. (By the way, where are all those coal mining jobs promised by dumb dTrumpf during his 2016 campaign? I just looked up Cold Peak Energy going at $0.10 a share- yes, that's ten cents a share.)

Protesters interrupt Mitch McConnell's introduction of Sen. Tim Kaine at the University of Louisville

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of President Donald Trump's key allies, joined U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine — a Democrat who was Hillary Clinton's running mate in 2016 — at a bipartisan-spirited event at the University of Louisville on Monday.

The Virginia senator came to Louisville as part of the McConnell Center's Distinguished Speaker Series. University of Louisville President Neeli Bendapudi took a moment to praise the center, which was founded 1991, for providing scholarships to students at McConnell's alma mater who hold varied political beliefs but share a desire to make a difference in their communities.

McConnell introduced Kaine to the crowd but was briefly interrupted by a group of about 10 people who stood up and protested the Republican leader.

"We are constituents," announced one of the people protesting, who also called McConnell out for accepting money from the fossil fuel industry.

By Dominique Jackson in Raw Story

Senator Mitch McConnell in Kentucky- While at an event in his hometown at the University of Louisville, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was greeted by angry protesters.

A group advocating for climate change showed opposition against the Senator.

“One protester, identifying herself as a McConnell constituent, shouted at the Republican leader: ‘why don’t you stand with us?’ The demonstration began as McConnell praised students on campus,” a report said.

Senator Mitch McConnell is missing the environmental moment- as usual!

An echo opinion published in the Kentucky Courier Journal

Green New Deal

Croplands are turning to desert, in parts of China, Kenya and Kansas. Entire species are disappearing. The Great Barrier Reef is dying.

Already, in Lexington, mosquito season lasts 10 percent longer than just a generation ago, exposing more people to the risk of the Zika virus and other diseases they carry. 

A nasty nickname for Senator McConnell happens to be "turtle head", but maybe the label is more of a metaphor than a slur. Certainly, McConnell knows how to hide from the truth about global warming. He could capture the opportunity to do the right thing by acknowledging the science about climate change, but he won't do it and, therefore, is rightly criticized in this Kentucky opinion:

McConnell wildly out of step with Kentucky and US on climate change- by Rhea Suh 

For the first time in his four years as Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell is poised to call a floor vote on a plan to confront the rising costs and mounting perils of global climate change.

But don’t be fooled. The Kentucky Republican means to bury climate action, not praise it, in one of the clearest signs yet of how wildly out of step he and others in his party are with the best interests of the nation — and the people of Kentucky.

McConnell, Donald Trump, and other Republican leaders have no plan of their own for addressing the central environmental challenge of our time, and little but derision for those who do.

To prove the point, McConnell and other Senate Republicans want to make a show of voting down a resolution that outlines the aspirations behind a Green New Deal, an ambitious call to national action to avert climate catastrophe.

A master of Senate process, McConnell knows this resolution contains big-picture goals, not specific legislation: that’s for Senate committees to craft.

Indeed, before McConnell unveiled his scheme to try to shut down talk about a Green New Deal, before the conversation can even begin, the resolution was slated to go before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. There, its animating ideas could be hammered out and refined through the customary process of hearings, expert insights and public debate.

Debate? That’s the last thing McConnell wants. 

Since 1989, he’s received more than $3.3 million in campaign contributions from the coal, gas and oil industries whose fuels produce the carbon pollution that’s driving climate change. McConnell has consistently voted against legislation that would help us reduce that dangerous pollution and confront the widening climate crisis — while there’s still time to act.

Our families deserve better. Nearly eight in 10 Americans — and more than six in 10 in Kentucky — understand the growing climate crisis we face; about seven in 10 expect our government to help fight it, and no wonder.

We just wrapped up the five hottest years since global record-keeping began in 1880. Of the 19 hottest years on record, 18 have occurred in this century.

Seas are rising, glaciers are melting, wildfires, storms and floods are raging.

Croplands are turning to desert, in parts of China, Kenya and Kansas. Entire species are disappearing. The Great Barrier Reef is dying.

Addressing this shouldn’t divide us red state and blue. Of the 15 states projected to pay the highest costs for climate change, 14, including Kentucky, voted for Trump.

Kentucky and its people are already paying the price.

Heat waves and attendant health threats are becoming more common, with the Bluegrass State on track to get 70 such days a year by 2050, a five-fold increase over current conditions.

Tourism is starting to sweat. Summer highs average a pleasant 87 degrees at popular Mammoth Cave National Park. That’s set to rise to a scorching 98 degrees, though, by century’s end, unless we take action now.

Already, in Lexington, mosquito season lasts 10 percent longer than just a generation ago, exposing more people to the risk of the Zika virus and other diseases they carry. Scientists predict more frequent and prolonged droughts like the one that slashed Kentucky’s corn output in half in 2012. And they warn that graceful trees like the sugar maple and American beech will be vanishing from the Kentucky landscape by 2100.

All of this and more gets much worse, the science tells us, unless we cut our carbon footprint today, so our children don’t inherit climate chaos tomorrow. That’s why we need assertive climate action that helps us rise to this challenge and create millions of good-paying American jobs doing it.

The people of Kentucky hold proud ground in the history of our country’s economy. They deserve their place in powering our future.

A Green New Deal could help, by promoting a just and equitable transition to the clean energy future we need.

That means bringing clean energy jobs to the state’s hard-hit rural and manufacturing areas. It means shoring up pensions and health care coverage for coal miners. And it means providing retraining for those who lose their jobs in an industry that has shed two-thirds of its Kentucky workforce in just the past decade.

Big ideas seldom arrive fully cooked. Advancing the goals of a Green New Deal with actual bills will take months. If McConnell has helpful suggestions, or any plan at all for confronting the growing dangers of climate change, we’d all love to hear it.

What we can’t afford to do is to allow this vital national conversation to be choked off before it gets started, as one more way to enable big polluters and their Capitol Hill backers to block the action we need to leave our kids and our grandkids a livable world.

Rhea Suh is president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group with more than 3 million supporters nationwide.

New Year's prediction methodology is trending regressive - an echo opinion

Although, at one time, predicting the future of technology was fun and certainly not subject to bias. Today, not so  much. In the universe of probabilities, predicting the future impacted by "climate change" will be regressive prognostication.

A book of technology predictions published in 1968, makes distressing reading at the end of a year that, a golden anniversary ago, looked positively thrilling. 

Technology predictions made in 1968 came up with nearly the same probability of accuracy as they would have if the predictors had simply placed their prognostications into a mug game.

In “Unforeseen,” Jill Lepore writes in The New Yorker about the regressive methodology for predicting the future.

What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago

A book of technology predictions makes distressing reading at the end of a year that, a golden anniversary ago, looked positively thrilling.

Prophecy is a mug’s game. In other words, like predicting the location of a pea placed beneath a triplicate of shifted mugs.

But then, lately, most of us are mugs. 2018 was a banner year for the art of prediction, which is not to say the science, because there really is no science of prediction. 

Predictive algorithms start out as historians: they study historical data to detect patterns. 

Then they become prophets: they devise mathematical formulas that explain the pattern, test the formulas against historical data withheld for the purpose, and use the formulas to make predictions about the future. That’s why Amazon, Google, Facebook, and everyone else are collecting your data to feed to their algorithms: they want to turn your past into your future.

This task, like most things, used to be done by hand. In 1968, the Foreign Policy Association, formed in 1918 to promote the League of Nations, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary by publishing a book of predictions about what the world would look like, technology-wise, fifty years on. “Toward the Year 2018” was edited by Emmanuel G. Mesthene, who had served in the White House as an adviser on science and technology and who ran Harvard’s Program on Technology and Society. 

Unfortunately, the book makes for distressing reading at the end of 2018, a year that, a golden anniversary ago, looked positively thrilling.

Two things are true about “Toward the Year 2018.” 

• First, most of the machines that people expected would be invented have, in fact, been invented. 
• Second, most of those machines have had consequences wildly different from those anticipated in 1968.

It’s bad manners to look at past predictions to see if they’ve come true. Still, if history is any guide, today’s futurists have very little credibility. 

An algorithm would say the same. Carlos R. DeCarlo, the director of automation research at I.B.M., covered computers in the book, predicting that, in 2018, “machines will do more of man’s work, but will force man to think more logically.” 

DeCarlo was consistently half right. (Haha sort of like the probability of picking the correct mug where the pea is hiding!)

In fact, DeCarlo correctly anticipated miniature computers (“very small, portable storage units”), but wrongly predicted the coming of a universal language (“very likely a modified and expanded form of English”). One thing he got terribly wrong: he expressed tragically unfounded confidence that “the political and social institutions of the United States will remain flexible enough to ingest the fruits of science and technology without basic damage to its value systems.”

Reporting on the future of communication, J. R. Pierce, from Bell Labs, explained that “the Bell System is committed to the provision of a Picturephone service commercially in the early 1970s,” and that, by 2018, face-to-face communication across long distances would be available everywhere: “The transmission of pictures and texts and the distant manipulation of computers and other machines will be added to the transmission of the human voice on a scale that will eventually approach the universality of telephony.” True! “What all this will do to the world I cannot guess,” Pierce admitted, with becoming modesty. “It seems bound to affect us all.”

Sharp-eyed observers in 1968 were already concerned about the warming of the oceans and the changing of the climate, but the atmospheric-science contributor to “Toward the Year 2018,” Thomas F. Malone, was excited by new technologies that would allow scientists to take control of the earth’s weather and climate. 

Malone served as the chairman of the Committee on Atmospheric Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences, which, in 1966, had issued a report endorsing “a long-range program of weather control and climate modification,” to be implemented by way of manipulating fog, cloud-seeding, and the “suppression of lightning.” He thought “the probability of success in broad climate modification is likely to exceed 50 percent by the year 2018.” Standing in the way of this objective, he warned, were political obstacles—the international coöperation required for a global climate-change program—and the possibility that, before such a thing could be fully executed, “large-scale climate modification will be effected inadvertently,” because, he had to admit, it appeared that the climate was already changing all on its own. 

“Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1900 has caused surface temperatures to rise 0.2 degrees C,” he acknowledged, hastening to reassure his readers that, while global temperatures could conceivably keep rising all the way to 2018, there was only “a small probability that these effects will not be tolerable.”

The only real doomsayer was the demographer Philip M. Hauser. He calculated that, by 2018, the world’s population would reach 9.7 billion (he was two billion over), with the steepest growth in Asia and Latin America, and the slowest in Europe. Also, that the distance between the rich and the poor, and between wealthy nations and poor nations, would widen. “Given the present outlook, only the faithful who believe in miracles from heaven, the optimistic who anticipate superwonders from science, the parochial fortunate who think they can continue to exist on islands of affluence in a sea of world poverty, and the naïve who anticipate nothing can look to the future with equanimity,” Hauser concluded. 

But the most prescient contributor to “Toward the Year 2018” was the M.I.T. political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool, whose research interests included social networks and computer simulation. “By 2018 it will be cheaper to store information in a computer bank than on paper,” Pool wrote. “Tax returns, social security records, census forms, military records, perhaps a criminal record, hospital records, security clearance files, school transcripts . . . bank statements, credit ratings, job records,” and more would, by 2018, be stored on computers that could communicate with one another over a vast international network. You could find out anything about anyone, without ever leaving your desk. “By 2018 the researcher sitting at his console will be able to compile a cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from store records) by people of low IQ (from school records) who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security records). That is, he will have the technological capability to do this. Will he have the legal right?” Pool declined to answer that question. “This is not the place to speculate how society will achieve a balance between its desire for knowledge and its desire for privacy,” he insisted.

And that was the problem with 1968. People went ahead and built those things without worrying much about the consequences, because they figured that, by 2018, we’d have come up with all the answers. Toward 2019! 

MaineWriter- My mug game technology prediction is just as subject to a 50/50 accuracy probability as anything the 1968 proclaimed experts came up with, foreseeing the future, in 2018. I am predicting that climate change will cause enormous human migrations and no amount of "walls technologies" will prevent this population shift. In other words, in my opinion, building walls to prevent migration is regressive prognosticating, because the technology will not work.

Donald Trump is a stupid climate change denier

Eugene Robinson opinion echo, published in the Albuquerque Journal, a New Mexico newspaper:

WASHINGTON – Climate change is happening “primarily as a result of human activities” and its damaging impacts – severe droughts, deadly wildfires, monster tropical storms, punishing heat waves – “are already being felt in the United States.” 

That’s the conclusion of the U.S. government, in an alarming new report the Trump administration doesn’t want you to read.

It can be no accident that the 1,656-page “Impacts, Risks and Adaptation” section of the latest blue-ribbon National Climate Assessment was released on the day after Thanksgiving, a graveyard of a news cycle when many Americans are focused on turkey sandwiches and Black Friday deals.

The report provides stunning new evidence for what we already knew: President Trump’s climate-change policy – ignore, obfuscate, delay, deny – amounts to environmental vandalism on a tragic scale.

Surely aware of what was coming, the president used his Twitter feed on Wednesday to pose as a weatherman and launch a preemptive attack: “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS – Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

Answer: It’s here, it’s all around us and it’s getting worse.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the report notes, global average temperature has increased by 1.8 degrees and global average sea level has risen by about 8 inches. These changes are accelerating. By the year 2100, if action is not taken to curb carbon emissions, the temperature climb could total 9 degrees and the sea level rise could exceed 4 feet.

Trump and other deniers can no longer claim with a straight face that no warming is taking place, since nine of the hottest 10 years on record have come since 2005. Instead, they try to blame some as-yet-unknown natural cycle. But the new climate assessment notes that “observational evidence does not support any credible natural explanations.”

Instead, “the evidence consistently points to human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse or heat-trapping gases, as the dominant cause,” according to the report. As I have shouted until I am blue in the face, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has risen from around 280 parts per million at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to more than 400 parts per million now. That is an astonishing 40 percent increase since humankind began burning fossil fuels on a massive scale.

This is no coincidence and involves no guesswork. Scientists can directly and precisely measure carbon dioxide concentrations during past eras by drilling ice cores in Antarctica or Greenland and analyzing air bubbles trapped within. According to records maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, ice cores show that over the past 800,000 years, levels of atmospheric carbon fluctuated between 170 and 300 parts per million – until recently zooming off the charts.

Resist any temptation to write all this off as scientific gobbledygook. Pay attention to the numbers, which are important and not very hard to follow. 

Denialist officials and commentators who throw up their hands and say “I’m not a scientist” are being disingenuous. There is no real scientific debate about the existence of climate change or the fact that human activity is driving it.

There is, however, a political debate about what to do. Trump is determined to accelerate climate change by boosting the production and use of coal – the “dirtiest” widely used fuel in terms of carbon emissions – and keeping oil prices low. This is the dumbest, most short-sighted policy imaginable.

Trump visited California to see the destruction of the horrific Camp Fire first-hand, which killed at least 85 people – with the death toll expected to rise as more remains are found – and destroyed more than 14,000 homes. According to the new climate assessment, the cumulative forest area burned in the western United States by wildfires since 1984 is fully double what it would have been if climate change had not occurred.

No, wildfires are not getting worse because not enough raking is being done, as Trump weirdly insisted. They are getting worse because of climate change.

So are tropical storms, flash floods and heat waves. Trump claims to be all about economic growth. But the new report predicts “climate change is expected to cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.” It adds that “annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars.”

The report sounds one more ominous note: Thus far, climate scientists’ dire predictions have proved to be conservative. The world is on fire. We have a president who plays with matches.

Email eugenerobinson@washpost.com. (c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group.

Denying science ~ how does it happen?

Donald Trump and Trumpism are supporting regressive thinking.

An echo essay published in "The Conversation", written by Anthony P. Shapiro. 

It's sheer stupidity for Trump and his "creationist" followers to continue in their nonsensical science denials.  

Horrible "anti-science" trends will eventually put the human condition at risk for putting America into an information dark ages.

Currently, there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among lay people: 

• climate change,
• biological evolution; and 
• childhood vaccination

On all three issues, prominent members of the Trump administration, including ~stupid Trump~ have lined up against the conclusions of research.

This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.

Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways.
No shades of gray

As a psychotherapist, I see a striking parallel between a type of thinking involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. As I explain in my book “Psychotherapeutic Diagrams,” dichotomous thinking, also called black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder.

In this type of cognition, a spectrum of possibilities is divided into two parts, with a blurring of distinctions within those categories. Shades of gray are missed; everything is considered either black or white. Dichotomous thinking is not always or inevitably wrong, but it is a poor tool for understanding complicated realities because these usually involve spectrums of possibilities, not binaries.

Spectrums are sometimes split in very asymmetric ways, with one-half of the binary much larger than the other. For example, perfectionists categorize their work as either perfect or unsatisfactory; good and very good outcomes are lumped together with poor ones in the unsatisfactory category. In borderline personality disorder, relationship partners are perceived as either all good or all bad, so one hurtful behavior catapults the partner from the good to the bad category. It’s like a pass/fail grading system in which 100 percent correct earns a P and everything else gets an F.

In my observations, I see science deniers engage in dichotomous thinking about truth claims. 

In evaluating the evidence for a hypothesis or theory, they divide the spectrum of possibilities into two unequal parts: perfect certainty and inconclusive controversy. Any bit of data that does not support a theory is misunderstood to mean that the formulation is fundamentally in doubt, regardless of the amount of supportive evidence.

Similarly, deniers perceive the spectrum of scientific agreement as divided into two unequal parts: perfect consensus and no consensus at all. Any departure from 100 percent agreement is categorized as a lack of agreement, which is misinterpreted as indicating fundamental controversy in the field.
There is no ‘proof’ in science

In my view, science deniers misapply the concept of “proof.”

Proof exists in mathematics and logic but not in science. Research builds knowledge in progressive increments. As empirical evidence accumulates, there are more and more accurate approximations of ultimate truth but no final end point to the process. 

Deniers exploit the distinction between proof and compelling evidence by categorizing empirically well-supported ideas as “unproven.” (Maine Writer ~ Hello? This author doesn't acknowledge the empirical evidence of "outcomes"!)

Such statements are technically correct but extremely misleading, because there are no proven ideas in science, and evidence-based ideas are the best guides for action we have.

I have observed deniers use a three-step strategy to mislead the scientifically unsophisticated. First, they cite areas of uncertainty or controversy, no matter how minor, within the body of research that invalidates their desired course of action. Second, they categorize the overall scientific status of that body of research as uncertain and controversial. Finally, deniers advocate proceeding as if the research did not exist.

For example, climate change skeptics jump from the realization that we do not completely understand all climate-related variables to the inference that we have no reliable knowledge at all. 

Similarly, they give equal weight to the 97 percent of climate scientists who believe in human-caused global warming and the 3 percent who do not, even though many of the latter receive support from the fossil fuels industry.

This same type of thinking can be seen among creationists. They seem to misinterpret any limitation or flux in evolutionary theory to mean that the validity of this body of research is fundamentally in doubt. For example, the biologist James Shapiro (no relation) discovered a cellular mechanism of genomic change that Darwin did not know about. 

Shapiro views his research as adding to evolutionary theory, not upending it. Nonetheless, his discovery and others like it, refracted through the lens of dichotomous thinking, result in articles with titles like, “Scientists Confirm: Darwinism Is Broken” by Paul Nelson and David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute, which promotes the theory of “intelligent design.” Shapiro insists that his research provides no support for intelligent design, but proponents of this pseudoscience repeatedly cite his work as if it does.

For his part, Trump engages in dichotomous thinking about the possibility of a link between childhood vaccinations and autism. Despite exhaustive research and the consensus of all major medical organizations that no link exists, Trump has often cited a link between vaccines and autism and he advocates changing the standard vaccination protocol to protect against this nonexistent danger.

There is a vast gulf between perfect knowledge and total ignorance, and we live most of our lives in this gulf. 

Informed decision-making in the real world can never be perfectly informed, but responding to the inevitable uncertainties (aka "outcomes!") by ignoring the best available evidence is no substitute for the imperfect approach to knowledge called science.