Unfortunately, most people do not understand that the action of water vapor is a feedback not a forcing.

I regret to be one of the first to be so absolute but the genie is out of the bottle. Do not expect our climatologists to be this honest. They are still “hoping” they don’t know the exact time of when imminent destruction is going to occur. That’s ok too. I don’t need to have every single supporting number. I have read all the numbers I need to and then I observe and sense the rest.

Our fate is sealed. Prepare your children.

I get 598 matches. You may want to correct this part of the otherwise excellent article.

[JR: You did a Google search, not Google News.]

Ah, you are correct. However, I would like to point out a broken link to Climatewire (under the links section). The web site has been shut down.

Wild weather battered USA in January - USATODAY.com
http://www.usatoday.com/ weather/ news/ 2008-01-31-wild-january-weather_N.htm

Adding ‘-site:.gov’ to the search helps find a couple more, but these are meager results.

(Google News only indexes articles in the last month)

Could this be due to the fact that some of the energy is now being dissipated as more extreme weather events…

I’ve always viewed that region of the U.S. normally subject to these incursions as the “South” and associate it with air conditioning required (hot and humid days, warm and saturated nights), spanish moss (needs warm winters and hot, humid summers), lots of bugs, frogs, snakes and such, as well as incredibly intense rainfall events. Rain like no one from the midwest or northeastern U.S. has ever seen.

The “South” is moving north with global warming. This prediction is one that is very robust and relatively easily made. Unlike global warming and the fate of tropical cyclone formation for example.

I don’t think most people appreciate the huge changes this will cause in rainfall intensity as well as elevated night temperatures. Most of the focus has been on the predictions of increases in heat related deaths for example.

I too am amazed at the lack of coverage this robust conclusion (see NASA’s earth observatory 2007 story on this) has recieved. The weather the midwest and northeast have experienced this past week will become the norm. I don’t see too many if any climate scientists refuting this.

Midwestern and Norteastern rivers and lakes are reacting badly to the imposition of the Southeast’s climate. Expect the abandonment of lots of farmland and low lying cities that developed as mill sites along rivers, etc.

For several years in the 1990s NE South Dakota experienced flooding - unprecedented in my lifetime. Then poof, it went away. Since the recent La Nina developed into a stout one, North America has experienced all sorts of newsworthy weather events.

“God gave man dominion over the earth and intelligents beyond all other species. Why shouldn’t we use these gifts to our fullest advantage?”

You wrote on another comment thread events such as this, (warm in the east, cool in the west, blizzards earlier this week in California, 4th coldest May since records have been kept) are “weather” events? You wrote: “its called weather, deal with it”……Are these “weather events” or is it “climate change”….. or does it depend upon your personal agenda?

general heat and wildness beyond her reach has climate implications, because there is no other apparent driver. it seems like.

Two 100-year floods could occur a year apart or even a month apart — it all depends on how much rain is falling or how quickly the snow melts. A “20-year flood” has a one in twenty (or 5%) chance of occurring in a particular year so it would be a less destructive flood than a 100-year flood while a “500-year flood” has a one in 500 (0.2%) chance of occurring so it would be much more catastrophic than a 100-year flood.

I try to stick with statistically anomalous extreme weather over large areas, like the unprecedented increase in tornadoes and the repeated record-breaking flooding.

Joe

Want to really worry, time to worry about food yields with the cooling. USDA has data showing the crops are behind due to cooling, but they still project good yields (incorrectly).

You wrote:

I try to stick with statistically anomalous extreme weather over large areas, like the unprecedented increase in tornadoes and the repeated record-breaking flooding.

I’m writing:

Do the cold temperatures and soggy conditions this Spring over a vast area of the Western United States constitute “statistically anomalous extreme weather over a large area”?

Seriously, a little balance?

By the way, what causes thunderstorms? Cold air Masses in conflict with warm air masses?

http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/10yave.jpg

You wrote:

These extreme downpours are precisely what is predicted by global warming scientists and models.

I’m writing:

You’re wrong. Scientists predicted droughts and higher temperatures. Just the opposite of what is occurring. Precipitation levels are rising globally, temperatures are dropping globally.

[JR: Enough of your blatant disinformation — scientists predicted higher overall precipitation, with dry areas getting drier and most other areas getting much wetter. This decade will be warmer than last decade, and await your acceptance of a bet that next decade will be warmer than this decade.]

Beginning on Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913, torrential rains across the Midwest dropped a record three months of rainfall in four days. Floodwaters funneled down Ohio’s Miami Valley into the heart of the vibrant industrial city of Dayton. Levees burst, houses were swept away, and downtown was gutted by fires blazing from broken gas mains. At the end of Easter week, nearly 100 Daytonians had perished, and tens of thousands more were left homeless and destitute–a tragedy that made banner headlines in newspapers nationwide. Out of Dayton’s ashes and mud rose fierce public resolve never again to suffer such destruction. The Great Dayton Flood of 1913 reproduces some 200 astounding photographs from the collections of the Dayton Metro Library and the Miami Conservancy District and the archives of the National Cash Register Company at Dayton History. They portray the terrifying flood, monumental destruction, heroic rescues, and compassionate leadership that occurred during the disaster and its immediate aftermath, as well as the pioneering flood-control engineering that has kept Dayton safe ever since.

The 1965 Flood of the South Platte River

On the evening of June 16, 1965, a wall of water described by some as fifteen feet high came roaring down the South Platte River, the result of extremely severe thunderstorms many miles south of Littleton. By midnight, the torrent crested at twenty-five feet above normal and was carrying forty times the normal flow. In its wake, the course of the South Platte River from Littleton to the Colorado-Nebraska border was a mud-encased, wreckage-strewn landscape of desolation. The great South Platte River flood of 1965 was not Littleton’s first flood, nor only disaster — it was simply the biggest and costliest, by far.
In 1864, just two years after the homesteading of Richard Little and his neighbors, two weeks of constant, heavy rainfall sent the river out of its banks around Littleton and nearly destroyed Denver downstream. Another flood in 1914 lasted for six weeks, following record snowfalls the previous winter which at one time measured four feet deep on Main Street and even prevented trains from moving. Yet another flood occurred in 1900 when the Goose Creek Dam up Platte Canyon broke. In 1946, the snow again fell — for seventy-one straight hours; in 1932 there was a severe drought; and in 1865, pioneer Mollie Sanford wrote of yet another plague: “In three days time an army of grasshoppers had destroyed the work of weeks.” Life hasn’t always been easy in Littleton.
There had been talk for some time about construction of a dam on the South Platte River above Littleton, but it inspired little interest. In the valley, Cherry Creek seemed to be the real nemesis, and that had been dammed in the 1930s. The wide, shallow, slow moving South Platte, even with the few examples above, didn’t seem to warrant the same precaution. What the South Platte had become, instead, was a waste dump. All along its length through the Denver area it was an eyesore littered by abandoned cars, refrigerators, construction debris and everything else that people looked to discard. In 1965, there was an accounting for that lack of respect for the South Platte River.
Residents of Littleton and metropolitan Denver had little reason to anticipate a flood on Monday afternoon, June 16. Although a rare tornado and severe thunderstorms had hit Loveland a couple of days before, the forecast was for scattered thundershowers typical for a summer afternoon. In fact, it was not even local precipitation which fueled the flood, but a violent cloudburst many miles south near Castle Rock. The ground was saturated from previous days’ rains, so the normally dry east and west branches of Plum Creek became raging torrents heading north to meet the South Platte, which was swollen itself by rains to the southwest.
Police were able to give people in Littleton several hours warning, so they could be evacuated. The first local casualty was the Columbine Country Club southwest of town, whose golf course and luxury homes were devastated. Overland Park golf course north of town suffered a similar fate. In between, Centennial Race Track, which was within days of opening its racing season, had most of its track and stable areas inundated. A massive rescue operation by owners, trainers and jockeys saved some 140 horses. The City’s water supply, which consisted mainly of a series of wells along the river, was nearly destroyed. A network of fire hoses run from the nearest Denver outlets provided emergency water for months.
As the flood continued north, it was more than just water bashing the countryside — it now included all the old cars and refrigerators and both old and new debris. This battering ram carried away or destroyed 26 bridges, including every one from Littleton north to the Colfax viaduct. Both Public Service Company power plants along the river were shut down, and emergency circuits became waterlogged and shorted out. As the flood continued north, other tributaries added their weight, Sand Creek and Clear Creek, and further north the Bijou and Little Beaver and the Poudre River. The communities of Sterling, Fort Morgan and Brush became isolated as the waters spread out over a quarter-million acres of farmland.
All told, it was estimated that the damage came to some $540 million, plus 28 persons lost their lives. The state could count itself fortunate that so few citizens were killed in one of Colorado’s worst natural disasters because it began in broad daylight and few people were caught without some notice. On the positive side, much of the eastern plains received relief from a three-year drought and farmers made the most of the situation. Plans were quickly finalized and construction began on the Chatfield Dam, being completed in 1972. And with a massive cleanup required all along the South Platte, municipalities began to turn the valley into a beautiful greenbelt which today belies its garbage dump past. The river finally got its respect.

JR,

What am I supposed to do, meet you at the Washington Monument with a carnation in my lapel so that you can recognize me? (Being that DC is built on a swamp it should be underwater if your doomsday pedictions come true).

Has there been any attempt to correct for increased weather station coverage? Joe R. sounds like Mark Twain’s Yankee in king Aurthur’s Court when the solar eclipse saved his plot bacon.
How’s this years flood compare to the 1927 flood?

They could learn a thing or two about presentation from the Australian Bureau of meteorology. In particular check out their climate extremes maps and charts.

Why is NOAA unable/unwilling to provide it’s data in such a clear, concise and easily searchable manner?

By the way, Australia is currently experiencing the predicted “doomsday scenario”. Just google ‘murray river collapse’ or ‘coorong colapse’ to see what I mean. We’re toast. (Unless of course the US would kindly send us a cadre of climate change denialists to disabuse us of our misinterpretations of what we are seeing across our increasingly tinder dry landscapes. We have plent of our own, but they’ve been rather ineffective so far at solving the problem.)