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Climate Fwd:

Does Climate Change Have Anything to Do With Floods in Thailand?

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Thai soldiers connected pipes to reroute water away from the Tham Luang Cave on Saturday.Credit...Sakchai Lalit/Associated Press

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After 12 members of a youth soccer team and their coach were trapped in the Tham Luang Cave in northern Thailand nearly three weeks ago, their plight, and then their rescue, captured the world’s attention.

By now, it’s well known that their predicament was caused by rising floodwaters in the cave. What is less known is that the pattern of precipitation that ensnared them is in keeping with broader changes to the region’s seasonal monsoon that researchers have attributed to climate change.

“Over the South Asian landmass, we’ve seen that extreme rainfall events have become more frequent,” said Amit Tandon, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth who studies ocean systems.

No one is suggesting that climate change itself was responsible for trapping the boys in the cave. Brief downpours have always been common during Thailand’s wet season, which runs from late May to early October. Periods of a week or two of relatively heavy rainfall are punctuated by drier periods.

The alternating dry and wet periods are called the intraseasonal oscillation, said Arnold L. Gordon, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. That variation has always happened, unrelated to climate change. But what has changed in recent years is that those wet periods have been wetter.

“It’s likely climate change, in the sense that there’s more moisture in the air,” Dr. Gordon said. Warmer air can hold more moisture, and “when the air has more moisture in it, you would get wetter wet bands and drier dry bands,” he said.

Flash floods were known to be a danger in the cave, and a sign at the entrance warned against entering in the rainy season. But the strongest rains normally begin in July, so the boys and their coach may have been caught off guard when they ventured inside the relatively dry cave on June 23. Though the total June rainfall in the area, 9.6 inches, was only slightly higher than average, five of those inches fell between June 21 and 28, according to Eric Leister, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather. The resulting floodwaters trapped the team and complicated rescue efforts.

“With any individual event, it’s hard to pinpoint the blame to climate change,” Dr. Tandon said. “But it’s certainly in keeping with the trends, in the sense of, ‘Do we see, statistically, more events like this?’ And the answer is, ‘Yes.’”


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Jeff Dalton/Pond5

I got a big surprise last week when I read that Burlington, Vt., had five consecutive days with temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Three of those days — July 1, July 2 and July 5 — were record-breaking.

About 10 years ago I lived in Vermont, and though the 100-year-old house I called home had three separate kinds of heating (central heat, space heaters and a wood stove), it had no air-conditioning. It didn’t need it.

In a summer that’s already seen plenty of high temperature records, Vermont’s heat may not seem that extreme. After all, Death Valley, Calif., reached a scorching 121 degrees Fahrenheit on July 6; the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles was a cooler 117 degrees the same day; and Scottsbluff, Neb., reached 105 degrees on June 28.

It was even hotter abroad. On July 5, a thermometer in the northern Saharan region of Algeria registered 123.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest temperature on record for all of Africa. And on June 26, Quriyat, Oman, broke the world record for the highest daily low temperature: 108.7 degrees.

But we expect hot places like the Sahara to have hot temperatures. It’s surprising when cooler places suddenly aren’t.

Ordinarily, early July temperatures in Burlington peak at about 80 degrees, much lower than the 97 degrees experienced on July 2, while evening temperatures dip into the 60s. But last week, the lows of 80 degrees matched the region’s average highs. In fact, July 2 was the first day on record that temperatures in Burlington didn’t dip below 80 degrees.

When temperatures don’t cool off at night, the added heat stress increases the likelihood that people will get sick or even die. And, for reasons that aren’t well understood, heat is often deadlier in places where people have less exposure to higher temperatures. In southern Quebec, dozens of people have died from the same heat wave that hit Vermont.

And there are signs that it’s not just people who can’t handle the rising heat — our infrastructure is struggling as well. In Chicago, firefighters had to hose down the Michigan Avenue Bridge when heat caused it to expand so much that it couldn’t be opened to allow boats to pass underneath.

Weather, of course, is not climate. But the pattern of heat waves being more extreme and expanding into normally cooler regions is in keeping with what we expect to see as the climate warms. A 2017 study in the journal Nature found that 30 percent of the world’s population currently experiences 20 or more heat-wave days per year. If we don’t rein in emissions that number will jump to 74 percent. It’s enough to make anyone sweat.


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Kendra Pierre-Louis and

We first published our list tracking the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks when President Trump hit 100 days in office. Back then, we counted 23 rules and regulations that either had been dismantled or were headed in that direction under the new administration.

Today, that list has grown to more than 75.

Assembling the list is not a straightforward process. We rely on sources like Harvard Law School’s environmental regulation rollback tracker and Columbia Law School’s Climate Deregulation Tracker, but we also pore over the Federal Register, where proposed and final agency rules are posted, as well as news reports from around the country. (Yes, it can get tedious.)

Why do this? To better understand what kinds of rules and regulations are being targeted under the Trump administration’s deregulatory push. The United States’ era of environmental regulation began at a time when it was not uncommon for the air to be so thick with pollution that it obscured the horizon. But Mr. Trump has argued that more recent environmental regulations are at odds with economic growth, particularly major Obama-era policies aimed at fighting climate change.

Rules targeted for reversal so far have included the Obama administration’s signature efforts to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, as well as broader air and water pollution controls, protections for threatened animals and habitats and safety regulations for toxic substances. The Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department and other agencies under Mr. Trump have strongly favored energy extraction over environmental conservation.

See the full list of rollbacks in our updated tracker here.


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