Flash flooding in central Texas has killed at least 104 people, including 28 children, and while Democrats have rushed to blame climate change for the disaster, climate analysts have countered that narrative.
The flooding began on Friday and escalated over the weekend, and the death toll continues to climb, according to CNN.
“North Carolina. Texas. When will floods finally wash away the climate change denial in DC that is now washing away America’s economically productive clean energy industries?” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, posted on X Monday.
“I think climate change is obviously a part of it,” Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday, after she brought up the issue. “These floods are happening more often.”
Are the floods happening more often? If so, how clear is it that the burning of fossil fuels is responsible?
Axios cited Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M, in predicting that increased floods are “exactly what the future is going to hold,” but the data arguably points in the opposite direction.
When approached for comment, the Environmental Protection Agency dismissed “partisanship” in response to the tragedy.
“Now is not the time for partisanship or finger-pointing,” an EPA spokesperson told The Daily Signal. “EPA stands ready to help Texans get back on their feet in the wake of this tragedy.”
Rainfall and Climate
An analysis of global rainfall trends over the past 200 years published by The Heritage Foundation earlier this year concludes that “global rainfall trends and extremes do not align with a global systematic change that could be attributed to a single driver, such as rising carbon-dioxide emissions.”
“Rainfall doesn’t follow a regular pattern—it goes up and down in unpredictable ways and varies a lot from place to place,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, told The Daily Signal. “Because of this, scientists use models that deal with randomness to study it.”
“While changes in local and regional rainfall are important for managing water and preparing for floods or droughts, there’s no strong evidence yet of a global trend in rainfall or a worldwide increase in extreme events that can be clearly linked to human-caused climate change,” she added.
Mario Loyola, a senior fellow in law, economics, and technology at Heritage, noted that even the National Climate Assessment—a federal government initiative focused on climate science that Loyola faulted as “alarmist”—”dismisses the attribution of any particular severe weather event to climate change.”
“For as long as people have kept records, Texas has always had periods of drought punctuated by severe rains and flash floods,” Loyola added. “It is irresponsible to use the tragedy of the Texas floods for political gain.”
“It’s sad to see the radical climate movement trying to exploit the tragic Texas flooding to advance its political agenda,” Steve Milloy, a senior policy fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, told The Daily Signal.
“Just for the record, this area of Texas is known for flash floods, extreme rainfall is not correlated with emissions and there hasn’t even been any ‘global warming’ over the past five days,” he quipped. “We should pray for the families and condemn the climate ambulance chasers.”
The Camp Mystic Floodplain
Anthony Watts, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, emphasized the area around Camp Mystic, a Christian all-girls camp at which 27 campers and counselors died after the nearby Guadalupe River flooded.
“Camp Mystic is built on a floodplain—therefore flooding is to be expected as part of natural weather variations,” Watts told The Daily Signal. “It is on sediment that has been deposited by hundreds, if not thousands of floods over the last millennium.”
“The flood was caused by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry becoming embedded into a broad mid-level trough over central Texas,” he added. “These remnant lows are typically slow-moving and drop heavy rain over a large geographical area where the troposphere destabilizes.”
This “caused massive flooding along the Guadalupe River, something that has happened many times before,” Watts added. He noted that a flash flood on the same river killed 10 teenage campers at the Pot O Gold Christian Camp in 1987 and swept away another 33 campers who survived.
“The event has nothing to do with climate change,” he argued. “It’s just weather, and not abnormal.”
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