Pirate's Cove

We know this because of one study, which means the entire Midwest is Doomed

How Midwesterners are handling constant flooding caused by climate change

Colin Moulder-McComb might seem an unlikely climate change refugee. The middle-aged video game developer is a middle-class Midwesterner, not an impoverished resident of a small island nation threatened by sea-level rise. But the resident of Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., an affluent, inner-ring suburb of Detroit where he lives with his wife and two kids, says global warming is destroying his family’s quality of life.

In 2016, heavy rains caused their basement to fill with 36 inches of water. “We thought it was a one-and-done, so we refurnished the basement,” he recalled. After all, they had been living in southeast Michigan for years, and the massive rainfall that caused the flood wasn’t a regular occurrence — or, at least, not yet. (snip)

This problem is not unique to Moulder-McComb’s house. His entire neighborhood has been deluged. “Everybody got it. The streets were just lined with [belongings from] people’s basements,” said Moulder-McComb. “Everybody’s got PTSD now.” The engines of many of his neighbors’ cars were flooded, rendering them inoperable. (snip)

While the climate in the Midwest has always been relatively wet, the frequency and severity of downpours has gotten notably worse in recent decades, due to climate change. Warmer temperatures have led to more evaporation and precipitation. Between 1951 and 2017, the Great Lakes region’s average temperature increased 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit, its annual rainfall has risen 17% and it has 35% more heavy rain events, according to a study by Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments, a collaboration between the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

First, their data on the temperature increase is very sketchy, and well outside the reality of 1.5F since 1850. It fails to account for urbanization (UHI) and land use. Second, it fails to prove anthropogenic causation as THE causation of an increased rainfall and heavy rains. Nor does it account for what the conditions were during previous Holocene warm periods, and if a study is claiming something is worse than normal, then we need to know what the normal actually is. But, hey, it looks like some urban hysterics in the Democratic Party mismanaged city of Detroit have PTSD.

Notice, though, this is just one small part of the “Midwest”, one which tends to be very much urbanized. What about the rest? And, really, Detroit is about as far east as you can get for the Midwest region.

(Photo is a screenshot of Yahoo News front page)