Texas, Oklahoma Start To Dry Out, Finally. Was Flood Climate Change?

This house in Wimberly, Texas was swept
away by flash floods in May. Photo by Jay Janner,
Austin American Statesman.  

Most of Texas and Oklahoma must love this forecast: Little or no rain is forecast there over the couple of days. This after enjoying a few dry days this week.

Instead, the flooding has spread northward into Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri.

The rains of May in Texas and Oklahoma were beyond incredible. As Dr. Jeff Masters points out, rainfall records for any month were shattered in many Oklahoma and Texas cities.

Masters writes: "Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon (Texas A&M University) came up with a back-of-the-envelope estimate for how often you would expect such an extremely wet month in his state: About every 2,000 years, assuming the climate of the past century were to persist."

Of course, the climate is changing. I can't sit here and show to what extent global warming influenced this epic flood in Texas and Oklahoma, but events like this seem to becoming more likely as climate changes.

As the left leaning Media Matters points out, the mainstream media, reporting on the Texas floods, has been in some cases a little more aggressive about bringing the subject of climate change into their coverage.

CNN brought in Bill Nye to discuss the possible connections to climate change, and several reports by this news organization brought up the potential climate change connection to the Texas floods in particular and an increase in huge gullywasher floods in general.

Media Matters noted that on the NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, reporter Miguel Almaguer discussed the "weather whiplash" that brought Texas from drought to epic flood in weeks, and showed how climate scientists think the whiplash is often related to climate change.

The CBS Evening News also brought up climate change in their coverage of the Texas floods.

ClimateChange.org has an interactive map showing the way record precipitation has increased across the United States.

I don't trust the dearth of record events before, say 1900 or so. The records are sparse, and not necessarily all that accurate.

But the trend in more recent years is clear, as you can see in the interactive map: