While the August flood that damaged or destroyed an estimated 110,000 homes in the Capital Region was caused by a rain event that meteorologists say only occurs once in every 1,000 years, some weather experts caution those who are now rebuilding that global warming could lead to another widespread flood in far less than a millennium.
“Climate change is happening,” Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, tells Business Report in a feature from the current issue. “Humans are changing the composition of the atmosphere. We know the Earth is warming because we are continuing to put more carbon dioxide into the air. The more warming that occurs, the more the odds of this happening again will increase. I do think this could happen again in 20 years.”
Climate change is a broad scientific term often used interchangeably with global warming that describes the effect of greenhouse gases on the environment. Though the issue remains controversial in the political world, there’s a strong belief by most in the scientific community that the Earth is warming because people are using more energy and aiding in the release of greenhouse gases, with the main culprits being carbon dioxide and methane. The energy from these gases is essentially trapped into the atmosphere, which increases air and ocean temperatures, experts say.
Even Gov. John Bel Edwards has weighed in on the subject. In an August interview with Time, he was asked if the flood was caused by climate change.
“We all have our own sneaking suspicions,” the governor told the magazine. “I will tell you that if these types of extreme weather events continue to happen with the frequency that we’ve seen recently over the next few years, I think that’s about the only thing that explains it.” Edwards was not available to be interviewed and expand upon those comments for this story.
Louisiana State Climatologist Barry Keim, who is also an LSU professor, isn’t convinced climate change can be blamed for the August flood and says more research is needed before a definitive conclusion can be made. What is known, he says, is that the storm that dumped 31 inches of rain over some areas in a two-day period was the result of a stalled, disturbed tropical weather system and high moisture content.
“This is a very complicated endeavor to try and understand,” says Keim. “I don’t think we can look at one single event and say it was caused by climate change. Events like this happen. Maybe our number was up. I think this was going to happen whether climate change was occurring or not.”
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