Global Drowning

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Meteorologists cautioned that no one should read too much into one storm. But the Atlantic Ocean is unusually warm for this time of year, they said, creating excess moisture in the atmosphere that can swiftly build a powerful rainstorm.
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I've been tracking flood stories around the globe every since the levees broke in New Orleans, using google alerts to receive timely emails to point me reports of surging rivers, swollen creeks, overflowing lakes, flash floods and coastal erosion in varius forms.

"Scientists and climatologists are looking at one another and we're just stunned because no one, even in the 1990s, projected the magnitude of the storms and degree of warming in the Arctic that we are seeing," he said.

Epstein sees a clear pattern: rain has increased in the United States by 7 percent in three decades; heavy rain events of more than 2 inches a day are up 14 percent and storms dumping more than 4 inches a day rose 20 percent.
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Most scientists say greenhouse gases could cause huge climate changes like floods, heat waves, droughts and a rise in sea levels that could swamp low-lying Pacific islands by 2100.

But not everyone blames human pollution for drenching the U.S. Northeast.
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Yes, right wing extremists and Calvinists do not. One of 'em explained to me the other day how the environment is far healthier for humans now than it was 200 years ago.

At current projections, Epstein said, a typical day in Boston could feel like present-day Richmond, Virginia, in 100 years under one model of the atmosphere and oceans produced by the federally funded New England Regional Assessment of 2001.

Epstein, who contributed to that study, said another model that sees Boston resembling Atlanta, Georgia with a 10-degree Fahrenheit (5.6-degree C) rise in temperature over a century could be conservative.
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