No warning?
Last weekend, the US experienced a dreadful mass casualty weather event. Some say it happened without warning. They are wrong.
The rain doesn’t fall anymore — it slams, it bursts, it stays. And when it comes, it comes without pity. Without pause. In the Southern United States, that’s not just metaphor. It’s science. It’s fact. It’s climate change made visible.
Texas. Louisiana. Florida. Georgia. Mississippi. In recent years, these states have experienced a steady escalation in extreme weather events — superstorms that seem to appear overnight, stall over communities, and leave behind fields of wreckage and floodwater.
Scientists call it “rapid intensification.” Locals just call it terrifying.
At the weekend in Texas, we saw a mass-casualty extreme weather event which claimed the lives of more than 80 people, including almost 30 children.
It is not the first of its kind. It will not be the last of its kind. But it has crystallised the thinking of a lot of people who’ve been trying very hard not to think about this subject at all. It was only a matter of time before something did.
No one is going to realistically claim that this is the event that slaps everyone out of their complacency or jolts all the fantasists back into reality.
You had Texas Governor Greg Abbott claiming the rains had stopped because of the power of prayer. You had right-wing conspiracy theorists saying it was faked — and then, when called out, pivoting into rants about geoengineering.
There’s no helping these people. There’s no getting through to them, or to their brain-dead audiences.
But for a growing number of others, the horrible facts are now undeniable. The change is visible, it’s measurable, it’s happening. The future we are racing toward is no longer theoretical. It’s taking solid form all around us.
The world is changing. That is the hard truth of it. The science is unquestionable. The consequences are unavoidable. We are no longer trying to prevent climate disaster — we are scrambling to contain it.
Reversing it may be a forlorn hope, but if we can at least halt the rise in global temperatures where they currently stand, we still have a chance of avoiding societal collapse. That’s the scale we’re talking about.
We’re not necessarily seeing more hurricanes, but what we are seeing is worse. Stronger winds. Higher storm surges. More rain — much more. The atmosphere holds more moisture because it’s warmer.
The oceans are hotter too, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, where sea surface temperatures are clocking in at up to 2°F above historical norms. And that heat? That’s fuel. It supercharges storms, pushing them from tropical depression to Category 4 in the time it takes to cancel a school day.
And when they hit, they linger. Hurricanes now slow to a crawl as they reach land, dumping vast amounts of rain in the same place for hours — sometimes days. That’s what happened with Harvey in 2017. It’s happening again and again now, only quieter. Not every storm is named. Not every event makes the national news. But they are bigger, wetter, and more frequent.
The rainfall in Texas this weekend was staggering. The kind of numbers we once called freak events. But this is no longer freakish. This is becoming the pattern. And future tragedies of this sort are not just likely. They are certain.
Recent analysis of this spring’s storms found that rainfall totals were boosted by as much as 20% by climate-driven atmospheric changes. In April, a wave of violent storms hammered the South and Midwest, with rainfall levels far beyond historical averages. One study suggested these storms were made up to 14 times more likely by our warming planet.
Of all the stupid things said in the aftermath of the weekend’s disaster in Texas, one line stood out: “there was no warning.”
But go back over the data. Go back over the science.
There was warning — plenty of it. This didn’t come out of a clear blue sky, either metaphorically or literally. The certainty of an event like this was telegraphed in advance. We just chose not to listen.
Forecasting systems are underfunded and overstretched. The National Weather Service has faced chronic staff shortages and budget cuts.
Communities are being asked to prepare for climate-driven disasters with fewer tools than ever before. And when the clouds finally burst? Whole towns are caught dangerously unprepared.
Worse still — entire nations are unprepared.
The UK has seen serious flooding after freak rainfall. Last summer, wildfires broke out across England. Just last week, Scottish firefighters battled a blaze in the north of the country that raged for days.
In the southern hemisphere, it’s worse again. Italy, Spain and Greece saw temperatures hit new records last week, part of a now-constant trend. This isn’t weather. This is planetary disruption.
And in the US — in the grip of climate denialism — the threat is compounded. Sea levels along the Gulf are projected to rise by up to 18 inches by 2050. That might not sound dramatic, but it’s enough to turn an ordinary storm surge into a deadly one. It makes low-lying towns uninhabitable. It overwhelms infrastructure and floods entire regions.
This is the new normal. And it’s only just beginning.
The landscape is changing — not just the physical one, but the psychological one. What does it mean to live in a place where disaster comes faster and stays longer? What does it mean to raise children in a world where the sky breaks open and the question isn’t if… but when?
It won’t happen without warning. The warnings are all around us.
It’s how we choose to respond that will determine the kind of world we live in. That’s what will decide our quality of life, if that’s still a term we’ll be using.