US Flood Trends
By Paul Homewood
Roger Pielke Jr skewers the latest alarmist hype:
Everything is getting worse, right? Flooding especially. NPR tells us that:
Heavier rainstorms driven by global warming are sending more water into residential neighborhoods from the Gulf Coast to New England to Appalachia to the Pacific Northwest.
A Federal Emergency Management Official official explained to The Washington Post:
We know that as climate changes, the impacts are getting worse. We’re seeing more and more flooding going on as a result.
Everybody knows this — it is conventional wisdom.
Not only is the conventional wisdom on flooding wrong, data show that flood impacts as measured by direct economic losses have actually decreased by about 90% since 1940 as a proportion of U.S. GDP. The United States is in fact more resilient to flooding than it has ever been. The reduction in flood impacts is an incredible story of success sitting out in plain sight that is completely ignored, in favor of stories that instead tell us that down is up.
The figure below shows U.S. annual flood damage as a proportion of GDP. In 1940 flood losses amounted to a 2023 equivalent of about $50 billion per year, and in 2022 they totalled about $5 billion, a reduction of over 90%.¹
Full post here.
As Pielke notes, economic impacts, whether good or worse, tell us nothing about climate impacts. If you want to analyse them, you need to look at the actual weather and flooding data.
And according to the EPA, there is no evidence that climate change has made flooding worse in the USA. All we see is the usual mixed bag, including increased flooding magnitude in some areas, mainly the Northeast, and decreased magnitude in others.
Figure 1. Change in the Magnitude of River Flooding in the United States, 1965–2015:
This figure shows changes in the size of flooding events in rivers and streams in the United States between 1965 and 2015. Blue upward-pointing symbols show locations where floods have become larger; brown downward-pointing symbols show locations where floods have become smaller. The larger, solid-color symbols represent stations where the change was statistically significant.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-river-flooding
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Well I’m gonna JUMP right in here! OK, warm air causes more water to evaporate: the Hotter, the Greater the amount of moisture absorbed. Conventional wisdom. But no matter HOW Hard my kettle or pots boil on the Rayburn, or the Burco bubbles away when the Thermostat is stuck, in the workshop, there are then CLOUDS of steam around, as per the old Flying Scotsman. ( Me in Drag, Full steam ahead up over the Slochd with full load heading for Smithfield ( sadly no more) ). So if I want to have RAIN droplets appear around the steam source ….. Please someone else STATE the obvious how to do it. Otherwise reality is just gonna be lost in the mists of time.
Their belief appears to be that ‘climate change’ (sic) will result in more water vapor in the atmosphere.
Until it rains. Then, the atmosphere will go back to it’s previous state, and that extra water will fall out.
‘more water vapor in the atmosphere ..’ .. yes but how do you get it back out ? I am basically trying to tease the answer out of someone else! 🙂
Yes but that does answer the question. If the atmosphere is permanently warmer, then it will permanently hold more water. When it rains, the atmosphere doesn’t like all water. So if the atmosphere is 21 degrees instead of 20, it holds more water. If when it rains its 16 degrees instead of 15, there’s less eating, not more.
Aye, and …. ? “If the atmosphere is permanently warmer, then it will permanently hold more water.” so WHEN or what , causes rain to fall? This is what I am asking to be stated by someone.
When I ‘m working ‘out of the machines’ Cab, as in walking about, I know that rain is imminent because I sense one of a couple of things ( without looking ‘up the glen’ to the heavens ).
All I ever seem to hear in the media is WARMING causes rainfall (increased). My Geog teacher told me otherwise, ” but she must have been wrong” then? I don’t think so. All we get in the media is that hot air absorbs more moisture and hot air rises. Yes, and then? If we have Global warming… of what , where and how much? And still, what causes the rain to fall, then light rain or heavy and extremely heavy rain?
It’s all a big joke. The Weathermen latched on to a FACT that warmer air can hold more water vapor. Fine.
Just because it can, doesn’t mean it will. Dew point and temperature vary all over the place. Being a degree warmer generally means nothing.
Sooner or later the air will rise and cool to the point where it can no longer hold onto the water vapour which will fall as rain, or some other form of precipitation. If the atmosphere is warmer the air may have to rise another few hundred metres before this happens, but given the height of the troposphere this extra height makes no real difference. Therefore in a sightly warmer world there should be an overall increase in rainfall. This could be a good thing if it results in fewer droughts and crop loss.
The 1973 flooding on the Mississippi River got a lot of major TV coverage. Stuff was on-site, full color, and lasting many days. At least one of the stations compiled and sold an hour’s worth at the end of the season.
Two prior storms are shown in the chart to be larger, but TV, especially color and on-site, was not a thing then.
Likely, one would have to have been born before 1960 to be aware of this episode in American history.
I live on the wrong side of the Pond to see this for myself but the daily bulletin from gCaptain tells me that the rainfall catchment area for the Mississippi is well below what is needed to maintain a good average depth for navigation. Panama Canal likewise.
When you own the MSM you can make up the narrative.
The Climate Change is a list of seven most recent expensive weather events.
That makes them unprecedented.
Its essentially wrong to talk about increases and decreases in what are constantly shifting areas of rainfall. How much rainfall where and when is subject to hundreds, perhaps thousands of variables in a chaotic system. Thus it shifts around in an apparently random pattern.
X amount of rain falling in (say) 1 hour could cause flooding due to inadequate local drainage, while the same X amount falling over a longer period might not.
A list of ifs and buts for flooding would be quite long.
And you can throw in the saturation state of the ground on which the rain is falling. A noted late 60s flooding event for Kent and Surrey came when heavy rain fell on ground that had no absorption capacity left. The damage remains to this day where 2 bridges on the River Mole either side of Dorking were washed away and never rebuilt.
An inch of rain on an acre of land is about 22,700 gallons.
We are now in November, well past the hurricane season. Where were all the hurricanes this year?????
Weren’t we promised a higher than average season?
Yes!! Every year!!
Climate is one of the most complex, non-linear, chaotic systems known to man. To ignore chaos is fraud. To claim that any extreme weather event is caused by man’s emissions of carbon dioxide is fraud.
Saighdear: The formation of clouds remains poorly understood as I think you are inferring. This type of science is ideal for doom-merchants and Fear Campaigners, as claims can be made but not easily disproved. The basis for condensation is to have nuclei that moisture condenses on at gas temperatures below dew-point. The Wilson Cloud Chamber is a clever case of forcing clouds to form in a chamber, but has not solved the condensation issue. Without particles the moisture stays gaseous until a much lower (supersaturation) temperature, somewhere around – 20 C I believe. Fortunately, the Flying Scotsman is pretty rain-proof!
Ha ha! at least you raised a smile thnx! Butno, I’m still not getting the SIMPLE answer I’m “expecting” {No grant funding chasing gravy train etc here}.
OK to put those of you out of your misery ….. Just as in school / Chemistry experiments or Brewing in Biology / Physics/ ENGINEERING, even, How di d
we capture gases as a liquid? Nobody but NO ONE has mentioned the simple state of warm Moist ( MOISTURE LADEN) air meeting up with the VERY COLD air ( don’t larf – but german tv tonight telling us there is a Polar artic THingy Summit being held around Frankfurt this now ?? ) – Very Cold when the Ice cap has melted ( they say). But I mean that the Hot air meets up against COLD air. The greater the temperature gradient, then the quicker / heavier the downpour. Static etc produces Lightning, and of course we know ( don’t we ?) about the mechanisms for delivering the different forms of precipitation .. Mist, rain, Tropical downpour, Hail, Snow and all in between, don’t we?
We’ve all seen the experiment of throwing a cup of hot water into very cold air and getting SNOW ?
So what did the Flying Scotsman leave in its wake going over the Slochd or Drumochter? Maybe the air was never quite cod enough or heated too much by coolish saturated air so that there wasn’t a big enough Temp differential to create noticeable precipitation, other than the Black stuff accumulating over decades.
Saighdear: Back in the 1990s I re-tubed the Flying Scotsman and refurbished the power train along with the F-S engineer at that time, Roland Kennington. The reason why the emitted steam does not condense into large drops but disperses into the atmosphere is the fact that the wet steam from the engine is mixed with hot flue gas at about 300C after the ejector. The drops then evaporate in the hot gas plume before the cold air hits them. If the flue gases were cooler there would be some interesting ice crystals on cold days, would be fun to do that.