New York City is suffering through yet another thousand-year flood.¹ They sure seem to happen more often than once every millennium, don't they? Based on some probably unreliable googling here and there, here's how many we've had recently in the US:
Take a look at the trendline: In a very short time the number of huge floods has quadrupled from 0.7 to 3.1 per year. But global warming is just a hoax, right?
¹A "thousand-year" flood is one that has a 0.1% chance of happening. This probability is extrapolated from records over the previous century or so.
If you have 1000 different locations with 0.1% chance of major flooding, then once per year is normal.
Yes, and that was the case a decade or two ago. Now, they are more frequent, much more frequent.
And if you don't base your "number of thousand-year floods per year" on a fixed set of locations with enough data on each to define a thousand-year flood for each, then you have no valid basis for comparison. I don't know if we have that from Kevin's "Here and there" source.
edited
The sewer mutants are going to start erupting into the surface to keep from drowning and then they'll be overcome with the incredible stench of the fresh, clear, unflushed garbage that spills out of the McDonalds and the KFC and it will drive them insane and there will be looting and shouting, and then it will stop raining and it will be over and they'll all be rounded up and put into some kind of sewer mutant rehabilitation center and conservatives will be just fucking nuts that no one declared martial law and shot them all when they justifiably could have, and it was some kind of crime and a grotesque moral failure to miss this plain as day never to be repeated perfect opportunity, where it is obviously the sewer mutants' own fault, and isn't it weird these things never happen in a red state where they're actually prepared for it? Isn't that strange?
Makes you think.
C.H.U.D.
It was insane. Sandy last rain even approaching this. Twas more and heavier but thank goodness no wind. For an idea of it think of a hard Caribbean downpour for over 8 hours straight. Was nuts.
The Atlantic has a good write up on this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/09/new-york-heavy-rain-flooding-state-of-emergency/675505/
Basically, looks like NYC is getting Miami levels of rainfall, and the infrastructure is not designed to handle that.
Notice how they stopped during the pandemic? The Chinese were waiting to see if it would bring America to its knees. It didn't, so they've resumed the global warming hoax.
If you consider only the data points from 2010 to 2021 and then do a 2nd order polynomial curve fit (which Kevin does for inflation) you end up with an arch - 0 for 2010, a high of 2.5 for 2016, and ½ for 2021.
Beware of limited-data-points, short-series, 2nd order trend estimates. They depend substantially on the time-span and the *selected* end points.
If you came out in 2021 with that chart, would it persuade some people that "global warming is just a hoax"? Yes.
I think we can all credit the Seinfeld Party for doing nothing, amirite?
A "thousand-year" flood is one that has a 0.1% chance of happening. This probability is extrapolated from records over the previous century or so."
The extrapolation typically assumes a normal distribution but the real distribution often has "fat tails" in which case the probability is underestimated.
Somewhere, a taxi driver is smiling.
I agree that there does seem more of these floods than it should be. But is there enough data to do a trend line with so few points to work with? I don't have the statistical background to exactly determine that, but when you are using data where you are comparing years with 1 occurrence vs ones with 3 occurrences, it seems a little too much...
To commenters: imagine if someone collected worldwide data on flooding, rather than just one place . . . oh, wait! This is what the IPCC does, and they issue regular reports with massive amounts of data from hundreds of institutions. All invisible to the general public, mishandled by the mainstream media so that contrary "opinions" by a tiny cabal of climate deniers still keep their foothold.
Both sides, ya know!
And speaking of our doughty media, all the reporting I saw this morning was about how "critics" were aiming their fire at NYC officials for not PREPARING better for flooding -- you know, raising resident taxes to pay for infrastructure being overwhelmed by decades of fossil fuel burning. Yeah, it's the mayor's fault, not the polluters'.
This is probably a sign of how climate events will be covered from now on. A “once in a thousand year” storm will hit and media will be asking the tough questions of local officials (esp. when the pols are Dems): “Everyone knew this was coming. Why weren’t you ready for it?”
But the finger will never be pointed at the real culprits. A few years ago, when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston — our very own HQ for Fossil Fuels Inc. — no one in media dared to connect the local catastrophe with the decisions of corporate boards in that city. It was just an unfortunate act of god that local communities have to prepare for.
(This is a corollary to another media favorite, the assumption that Dems need to fix what the GOP breaks. E.g., the House Republicans, at war with themselves, cannot pass a budget, yet the media asks questions about what Biden will do to avoid a shutdown.
I don’t think this is getting enough attention, but GOP crazies are trying to defund support for Ukraine, defund ICE, defund Covid response, while eliminating salaries for targeted individuals, and getting themselves a raise. I wish this was a “once in a thousand year” episode of corruption and stupidity, but the curve on that chart is getting steeper.
We may be in for one of the worst shutdowns in history and media will claim that Biden shares the blame.)
Here we have Kevin being a global warming scold.
In his very next post https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-gasoline-during-my-lifetime/ he laments the demise of $2 a gallon gasoline …
It didn't seem like lamenting to me. Merely observing.
"But global warming is just a hoax, right?"
Climate change, Kevin, climate change!!!
Also, I thought the MAGA-nuts had mostly given up on denying climate change. Instead, they're saying that it's not man-made, that it's just a natural cycle we're going through.
As usual Kevin doesn't give a real source of the data. His graph is probably the result of an increase in frequency of publication of reports of individual "thousand-year" events, not necessarily the actual events. Fifty years ago - or even before 2010 - there was very little concern about global warming and no reason for people to be talking about floods in these terms. A report on a flood might say "the water hasn't been this high in 50 years" (not 1000 years), but that doesn't provide the kind of information you need to legitimately make claims like Kevin makes.
This is not to say that flooding is not something to be concerned about - aside from coastal areas disappearing beneath the waves there will probably be more rainfall in most places.
No interest in litigating the issue of Global Climate Change, but for the 10% or so of readers who actually care about facts rather than tribalism, the details of climate this year are probably not what you think.
The real factor making the difference (after all CO2 did not change THAT much relative to last year, or the year before) is a massive volcanic eruption in the Pacific which dumped vast amounts of water vapor into the stratosphere. Both these details are important. Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, but USUALLY it precipitates out as rain thus its effect is more or less self-limiting and constant. But in the stratosphere technical details of how the temperature is layered mean that precipitating out as rain does not happen.
The expectation is that
(a) this warmed things up by about 5 years relative to the natural trend. In other words this is NOT a claim against anthropogenic Climate Change, it's about the details.
(b) the water vapor is expected to persist for 3..5 years. Meaning we'll probably stay more or less flat at this level of craziness for another five years or so, then back to the expected rise to even higher levels of craziness.
Tech details here
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/talkin-about-hunga-tonga