Little Help Over Here

First, I'd like to remind everybody of this one thing: in 2012 the NC legislature passed a resolution barring state institutions and agencies from using any reports on radical ideas like AGW and Climate Change and Sea Level Rise as they updated their plans for Emergency Response.

Let's just let that one marinate for a bit.

From Lumberton - a quiet little town about 70 miles inland from Wilmington - WaPo's Sarah Kaplan has a story about people caught in the massive ongoing fuckup that is the emerging American Plutocracy:

Paddling through the swamp that was once her front yard Tuesday morning, Megan Curry saw this waterlogged community through the eyes of someone who had lived there all her life. 

That trash-strewn waterway was really a paved road. Those submerged shingles were the roof of the shed that held Curry’s childhood Christmas ornaments. And this sodden structure — with its walls buckling, its stairs crumbling, its floorboards detached from the foundation and floating in a foot of water — this was home. It was the house her grandfather built, on land her great-great-grandparents cleared, the house her family had finished repairing just 11 months ago in the wake of Hurricane Matthew.

But out there was the Lumber River, normally so distant it’s not even visible through the trees, now sloshing into her living room for the second time in as many years.

All Curry could think was, “Again.” It had happened again.

When it inundated North Carolina in 2016, meteorologists called Hurricane Matthew a “500-year rain event,” the kind of downpour that was likely to occur once every half-millennium. But then, just two years later, here came Florence, a “1,000-year event” that hit all the same places in all the same ways, if not harder.

“This can’t keep happening to us,” said Charles Gregory Cummings, mayor of Pembroke, 10 miles upriver from Lumberton. “We know what to do, but we need help.”

Refresh your KnowledgeBase at Scientific American - from May 2018:

Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area with up to 60 inches of rain last August, was one of the most outlandish storms ever to hit the U.S. Ironically, it crossed a Gulf of Mexico that had been calm for days and quickly quieted again afterward. This rare situation allowed scientists to obtain unusually specific data about the ocean before and after the hurricane, and about the storm’s energy and moisture.

Last week researchers published that data in Earth’s Future. The numbers indicate the amount of energy Harvey pulled from the ocean, in the form of rising water vapor, equaled the amount of energy it dropped over land in the form of rain—the first time such an equivalence has been documented. Investigators say this revelation supports assertions climate change is likely to make Atlantic hurricanes bigger, more intense and longer-lasting than in the past. The researchers calculate climate change caused Harvey’s rainfall to be 15 to 38 percent greater than it would have been otherwise.

It gets worse until we get together and start demanding better service from Coin-Operated Politicians.