Originally published on August 11, 2024.

Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The steady, upward turn of the dial on a host of threats to our homes, our societies and the environment around us.

We might also be changing the climate in an even bigger way.

For the past two decades, scientists have been raising alarms about great systems in the natural world that warming, caused by carbon emissions, might be pushing toward collapse. These systems are so vast that they can stay somewhat in balance even as temperatures rise. But only to a point.

By Raymond Zhong and Mira Rojanasakul. Read the full article here.

When Hurricane Sandy rammed the Jersey Shore on the night of Oct. 29, 2012, saltwater fisherman Nick Honachefsky was living in Camp Osborn, a community of tiny bungalows a mile south of Mantoloking on Barnegat Bay Island. Earlier that day, Honachefsky had taken a bottle of Captain Morgan rum with him on a walk down the beach, figuring the arrival of a hurricane meant it was time to start drinking and take a few pictures. The news that cops were banging on doors, telling people who were insisting on riding out the storm that they should write their Social Security numbers on their wrists so their bodies could be identified later — plus a phone call from his worried mom — made Honachefsky decide to spend the night at an ex-girlfriend’s house on the mainland.

A few hours later, the storm’s surge roared on top of a high tide across the skinny barrier island, opening broad new inlets as the Atlantic poured up Barnegat Bay. Most of the bungalows that made up Camp Osborn, including Honachefsky’s 750-square-foot house, were washed away. A friend of Honachefsky filmed the storm’s arrival. “He’s like, ‘I think I did see your house. It was the blue one, right? Yeah, it’s floating down Route 35. It’s on fire,’” Honachefksy remembers. When he was finally able to return to the site of Camp Osborn 10 days later, Honachefsky saw 30-foot flames of gas still shooting out of the ground. “It looked like the oil fields in Kuwait,” he says. An exploding transformer had kicked off a fire that continued to burn; there was no gas shutoff valve for the island.

By Susan Crawford. Read the full article here.

As the past few weeks have shown, flash floods can develop very quickly in both rural and urban areas, with mild to catastrophic impacts. That’s part of why flash floods are so critical to study, according to Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a meteorologist and senior staff researcher at the Columbia Climate School’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness. “Some parts of the world will never see potential disasters like wildfires or tropical cyclones, but there are very few areas at zero risk of flash floods,” says Kruczkiewicz. And because of the wide variability in potential impact, “it demands extra sensitivity in terms of how you communicate risk, as a run-of-the mill flash flood is very different than a 30-foot wall of water.”

Kruczkiewicz’s current research focuses on extreme weather events such as flash floods, and the application of climate and weather data and forecasting to reduce disaster risk and facilitate humanitarian action. In the following discussion, Kruczkiewicz talks about why the Texas floods were so devastating, how warning systems need to consider very different populations—e.g., recreation-seekers vs. locals—and how we might integrate both technology and local knowledge to avoid such tragedy in the future.

By Adrienne Day. Read the full article here.

Nearly every county in the United States has experienced flooding in the past few decades, but just 4% of homeowners nationwide have flood insurance, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

It’s what experts call the flood insurance gap. Most homeowners insurance doesn’t cover flooding. And while FEMA aid may be available to help people repair their homes after federally declared disasters, it often covers just a fraction of the costs.

That means when floodwaters come, people frequently are on their own to pick up the pieces. It’s a reality communities across the country are facing after flooding hit parts of Texas, New Mexico and North Carolina in the past week alone. In all three states, the floods were caused by extremely heavy rainfall inland — a risk that’s growing with climate change. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. As temperatures rise, it’s fueling more intense rainstorms that drop more water in shorter periods of time.

By Michael Copley. Read the full article here.