Dallas hit by 1 in 1000 year flood: are opinions changing?

[JRDelirious]

@bump

The problem is that when it’s described as a “1 in 1000 year flood”, it’s easy for a certain segment of the population to merely consider it something that happens every thousand years on average in a very specific area.

Nothing we’ve seen recently is out of the bounds of “normal” when taken in isolation- every decade or so we get a serious cold snap. We get severe rains periodically. We get heat waves.

It’ll take several of the same kind of event over a fairly short period of time for them to finally realize that something’s up. One severe heat wave, one crazy flood, one super cold snap isn’t going to convince a whole lot of people that this is definitely climate change related.

What Northern_Piper and dolphinboy and bump said. A freak storm is going to be considered just that, a freak storm. And when it does becomes an observable pattern, that’s when the “thousand year event” nomenclature itself contains the seed of continuing denial for a public that is not science savvy and may be even science-averse. How? Like so: “Well, the so-called ‘experts’ said these sorts of things would happen once in a thousand years. They are happening a couple of times a decade instead. So they were wrong and they’re coming up with an excuse as to why. They were wrong then, why can’t they also be wrong now, looks to me like they’re just making it up as they go along.”

And what those voters are going to ask of their political leaders is not green living, it’s seawalls, spillways, levees, dams, etc. to keep the water away where there’s too much, and aqueducts and desal plants to bring it where there is too little. Emissions, schmissions, just keep the water in a safe place and let me keep my job in the oil industry, this is Texas!

[bump]

I want to amend what I said earlier; it’ll take several events in a short period in the same area, or for the news media to accurately report on things.

I recently read that the Dallas floods were the FIFTH of SIX 1000 year flood events in the last month in the US. That has never come up on the evening news that I’ve watched- it’s all been dramatic fireman rescues, people wailing about the loss of their stuff, etc… No mention that the Kentucky floods and the Dallas floods are part of the same pattern.

Yeah, it’s out there if you go digging, but it’s not front-page news like it should be.

[Gatopescado]

I always thought “1000 Year Flood” was just a figure of speech.

[Chronos]

It’s maybe becoming that, but it used to have a real meaning: It used to mean, literally, that an event that severe had, on average, only a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year. Now, it’s difficult to be very precise on “1000 year” events, because the further back you go, the worse the data is (especially once you go back before dated contemporary records), but “100 year” events used to be pretty reliable.