bottom land is always, flat, near water, productive, with many other resources on the hills and in the river, and then occasionaly, a trap
Just telling people not to live on fucking flood plains, goes nowhere......it is a perenial recuring problem that is so common and ancient that it has been recognised by archiologists, that humans have exploited the resources in river valleys, built there settlements, and then denuded all of the vegitation, and then blam, a flood, and there settlement gets instantly burried, bad for then, awsome for archiologists who find all there stuff, in water logged soil, interesting organic artifacts are often in "perfect" condition.
The floodings or the tragedies?
> The full risk profile of our planet is impossible to determine
Was this really necessary to avoid this specific tragedy?
This is a classic 'unless we can have a perfect solution to the problem, we shouldn't do anything all' argument. It is usually applied to problems where the solutions involve helping non-rich people.
And fun fact is that people who made those bad decisions first falsely blamed others, congratulated themselves on being awesome. And now that they want money from FEMA, they still want to destroy it. And they still want to cut weather prediction which they blamed despite being correct.
At a more macro level, we certainly do understand relative risks of specific areas after interacting with them long enough. We begin to get a better picture of what makes one flood plain significantly more dangerous than another. There are instances where things like this can be avoided, or at least mitigated to a certain degree.
The first topic is whether people will listen to weather warnings and change behavior in response to them in the first place. In that sense, it seems like a direct and urgent evacuation order should have happened, but I do still find the timeline rather short. Hindsight is 20/20 on that.
The second topic is the author’s opinion that the left-leaning section of media isn’t doing their due diligence.
Let’s be real here, the author of the article is using a cherry-picked event that happens to allegedly not be a result of climate change to try and discredit the general idea of climate change. I don’t think the author intended to discredit climate change as a concept but that’s how the audience will read it.
Sure, the New York Times got it wrong in this specific case and at least partially jumped to a conclusion, but it is established observed scientific fact that human caused climate change is causing and going to cause more extreme weather patterns moving forward.
It is also established fact that DOGE made cuts to the NWS and had to re-hire to stabilize the department as recently as last month. [1] Furthermore, the Trump administration intends to make deep cuts to the NOAA within its 2026 budget proposal. [2]
So while this specific event may not have been affected by budget cuts, we don’t know that for sure yet. Opposition Democrats are asking for investigations into that very question.
And even if NWS cuts didn’t affect this event, it’s still entirely fair for the political discussion to question the merit of making cuts during the same timeline as a preventable tragedy. At some point the administration must own the optics it generates for itself. If it didn’t want those optics it would commit to fully funding the NOAA and NWS, but because this administration has taken action to cut staff and funding, they do have to own the optics even if the optics aren’t always perfectly in line with the truth of the cause and effect. That’s just how politics work.
In other words, if I cut funding to the road department or even merely propose funding cuts and the next day my constituent hits a pothole, they’re going to blame me even if my actions didn’t directly create that pothole. And that blame is politically justified and warranted, because my political stance is that we are spending too much on road maintenance, when clearly that’s not the case.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/national-weather-service-hiring-spr...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/11/nx-s1-5361366/major-budget-cu...
First of all, the NYT article did NOT claim that the central Texas floods are the result of climate change, and for sure it did not claim that there is any evidence for it. In fact, the supposedly left leaning morally indefensible article actually said that: "Hill Country – the part of the state where the Guadalupe River swelled on July 4 – is sometimes called “flash flood alley” for how at risk it is to seemingly out-of-nowhere surges of water."
So the NYT already acknowledges the history of flooding. The main focus of the article is that climate change is increasing the chances of floods 'such as these in Texas' and highlight the importance of NOAA for dealing with its impacts. And it does so by making a sound argument with references to authoritative sources.
Until an attribution study is done you can't say for sure that 'science says' the odds of the Texas floods were increased by climate change. But you can't say it wasn't either. I won't be so annoying to say its morally indefensible, but its definitely incorrect.
Furthermore, the idea that climate change increases extreme weather events is quite defensible and easy to understand, maybe there is even consensus about it among climate scientists. Its not morally wrong to think the Texas floods fit into this pattern, it is actually quite obvious to think they do.
Honesty I was close to pointing this out but decided to make the most “benefit of the doubt” argument possible.
Likely __hightly__ targeted mobile device alerts. Localize to cell tower and maybe even quadrant and issue warnings like "You are in a flood plane that might experience a flood based on heavy rainfall."
It can't be like the 'smoke alarms' which I've been trained are just 'battery eating middle of the night awakeners'. I've only _only_ ever had those go off because it's a low battery, or on a muggy hellish night because it cooled off enough for the relative humidity inside to become condensing. False alarms literally Pavlovian train someone that it is not an emergency, it's an annoyance.
This could be looked at as a result for bad choices our elected pols made over decades.
It's not just the elected pols, it's the people who voted for the elected pols, too.
If they are responsible then do they deserve to suffer for those poor decisions?
If someone tells you what they're about and you vote them in, yes. If someone shows you what they're about when in office and you re-elect them, double yes.
>What about if you didn't vote?
Fun idea. If you didn't vote, you're not a voter I suppose, and it's not your fault. But if you would've preferred a different outcome that could've been achieved by the alternative candidate and you still opted to abstain, then perhaps you're responsible to a degree.
>If they are responsible then do they deserve to suffer for those poor decisions?
I certainly wouldn't argue that anyone "deserves to suffer" for poor decisions, but it's true that actions have consequences. Shouldering blame, perhaps, might be a better way of looking at it, but I don't suggest that in a mean way.
Even typing out this comment feels dirty as it's against hn commenting rules.
However...this is 50 percent of threads nowadays.
This isn't how climate science or causality works in relation to climate change. The climate is a chaotic, complex sysem that does not have a single, identifiable nexus by which we can "prove" things happen.
Climate scientists know this and, instead of trying to demonstrate irrefutable proof, point to a better need for monitoring and warning systems, of exactly the type mentioned in this article.
It is unfortunate that the author felt the need to lean into this argument, as is it precisely this kind of perspective that leads people to become suspicious of monitoring and warning systems (by generally rejecting scientific argumentation) - the exact problem that the author claims led to avoidable deaths.
The whole approach is quite confusing to me - why identify the issue and then act to reinforce the issue?
- if his analysis of data is correct this _one specific kind of wetter event in this one specific region_ seem to not have happened majorly more or less in recent years
- but similar events did happen since the 1940 often enough to call it IMHO negligent to not have precautions in place
- people are already abusing the even to push political propaganda, mostly about the weather service not doing a good job (probably with the intend to kill it doge style and replace it with a Musk company or similar), similar people on the other side are using it for political propaganda about climate change distancing yourself from either of it seems good
- now making people believe climate change is bad (as it really is) sound good, but if you use faulty easy to disprove examples for it it can easily have the opposite effect, in addition politicians use climate change to opt out of responsibility as in "no one could have predicted it because that new caused by climate change", but it isn't new and predictable (and was predicted)
so instead of derailing the discussion into one about climate change which most likely will end up fruit less it's better to focus about the facts at hand
- it's a flash flood risk area
- similar events have happened frequent enough through history for this to be known
- it was warned, repeatedly and reasonable price, about the damage
- either the warning didn't reach people or they ignored it
and in the last point we have direct actionable things:
Ignored it? Hold people responsible for negligence, idk. about US law but in the EU negligence (especially gross negligence leading to harm of people) is something you mostly can't opt out of no matter what you try.
Not reached them? Then that is another action point where we can find ways to improve it.
> Furthermore, weather model forecasts indicated the potential for a major precipitation event over this historically flood-prone region during the prior days.
So the answer is yes. Yes, it could have been entirely avoided had the landowners built in such a way that respected the land’s tendency to flood. Yes, it could have been avoided if landowners took warnings seriously, paid attention to past flood events, if the state had put flooding mitigation measures on a river or area known for flash flooding, or if literally anyone had observed that putting dormitories at or near river level was a generally awful idea from a safety perspective.
The fact people died in one of the most predictable types of disasters out there, yet are still trying to weasel around blame or fault, is beyond shameful, and something we don’t need Op-Eds about so much as we need more people calling it what for it is:
A wholly preventable tragedy.
Conservatives love government regulations. They do not like the kind of regulation that prevents frauds or prevents them from harming others.
But, they like it when government regulates personal lives of their perceived enemies, protects large businesses at the expense of poorer people.
One of those parties has gone completely off the rails into authoritarianism and science denial. Oligarchy is at the root of it: the barons can't sell "clean coal" and "drill, baby, drill" if climate change is seen to be tearing the world apart. Money über alles.
You'd think most people would be repulsed by such a party, but turns out that humans have a neat little exploit! Due to the fact that the parties are completely entrenched and about equally as popular, people intrinsically assume that their policies also have equal merit.
Hence our descent into shit.
[0]https://www.vox.com/2017/4/22/15377964/republicans-environme...
So if you are a local or state level official, this is what is under your control. The problem tho is that unlike the hypotheticals, taking a stand on this would require action, and/or taking responsibility.
I wish I had better ideas.
quite predictably, every time there's a major weather event in the news, he will chime in to give reasons why he thinks it shouldn't be blamed on climate change:
> 2018: Northwest Wildfires: Are We Seeing a "New Normal" Due to Climate Change or The "Old Normal"? [1]
> 2021: Is the Texas Cold Wave Caused By Global Warming? [2]
> 2021: Was Global Warming The Cause of the Great Northwest Heatwave? Science Says No. [3]
> 2022: Misinformation about Sea Level Rise [4]
> 2025: Why the LA Wildfires Have Little to do With Long-Term Drought or Climate Change [5]
> 2025: Seattle Times Climate Lab Misinforms about Climate Change, Sea-Level Rise, and Seattle Flooding [6]
the overall takeaway across all his reporting seems to be that everyone but him is over-exaggerating the effects of climate change.
and his "no connection to climate change" message often gets repeated beyond his blog, for example [7]:
> Mass also emphasized that the floods had no connection to climate change.
> “The climate change connection is non-existent. There is no trend in heavier precipitation in this region. There is no upward trend in floods,” he explained.
0: when he's not comparing the George Floyd protests in Seattle to Kristallnacht (https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article244800747.h...)
1: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2018/08/northwest-wildfires-a...
2: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/02/is-texas-cold-wave-ca...
3: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-ca...
4: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2022/03/misinformation-about-...
5: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2025/01/why-la-wildfires-have...
6: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2025/06/seattle-times-climate...
7: https://mynorthwest.com/john-curley/texas-floods-cliff-mass/...
Deeply, deeply pathetic. He is either so uninformed he shouldn't talk about it (I mean, I understand talking out of your ass when you're in your twenties, but the older you get, the more pathetic it becomes) or he knows and still does the comparison, which is pathetic in a different way.
Flash Flood Alley exists from Medina county to the south to Cooke and Grayson counties in the north. Uvalde had 22" fall in 3 hours in 1935.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Flood_Alley
https://www.cityofdenton.com/ImageRepository/Document?docume...
Edit: I live on high ground in FEMA zone X within a mile / 2 km of the Guadalupe river.
actionfromafar•7mo ago
vintagedave•7mo ago
https://chatgpt.com/share/686cfd32-f578-800e-997b-1fbee9c185...
VMG•7mo ago
actionfromafar•7mo ago
vintagedave•7mo ago
happymellon•7mo ago
They voted against building an early warning system because, as one person put it the money coming from FEMA was:
> Resident 2: And I'm here to ask this Court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House.
These are the gibbering idiots that will represent you. Biden wasn't even the most "Communist Government" of the previous 10 years.
Not entirely sure (as an outsider) what makes him Communist outside of not throwing Sieg Hiels when he was elected.
andrewl•7mo ago
consumer451•7mo ago
How would one even begin to undo that level of programming?