Behind WA flooding, the inescapable specter of climate change | Jon Talton

The list of monetary costs and suffering from human-caused climate change is growing in the aftermath of historic flooding in Western Washington.

As I write on Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of Puget Sound Energy customers are affected, while the Alpental ski area near Snoqualmie Pass endured winds of 112 mph, according to the National Weather Service. Meanwhile, 82-mph gusts hit the pass itself. Rivers around the region are flooding as the atmospheric river continues.

Oregon residents woke up to power outages and strong winds, cutting electricity to more than 48,000 houses, mostly in and around Salem.

A flood watch remained for much of the region, with a blizzard expected for the Cascade Range and higher elevations, according to the weather service. Serious flooding remained possible along the Skagit River, which runs through Mount Vernon between Everett and Bellingham on its way to empty into Puget Sound.

Gov. Bob Ferguson said Highway 2 would be closed for months because of the flood damage.

My colleague Conrad Swanson wrote, “River waters ripped through a second levee in Western Washington on Tuesday, forcing more evacuations and emergency repairs as the deluge of rain continues.”

Back-to-back atmospheric rivers have swollen the region’s rivers, saturating earthen barriers that are vital defenses near populated areas. Now, levees are in danger of losing their strength in some localities, posing serious risks.

He continued, “Water was seeping through levees throughout King County, and state officials are watching two dams elsewhere for cracks and potential breaches. Others, however, aren’t a cause for concern, including the Howard Hanson Dam, 35 miles east of Tacoma, and the Mud Mountain Dam, southeast of Enumclaw. They are ‘operating as designed,’ according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.”

“The atmospheric rivers, the ARs, are continually reloading,” former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief scientist Ryan Maue, now a private meteorologist, told The Associated Press. “The amount of rainfall in the three-week period could be, you know, 20 to 30 inches. That’s quite extreme … I wouldn’t want to live there. Not right now.”

He estimated that the waterfall is enough to fill more than 18,000 Empire State Buildings or Oregon’s Crater Lake.

Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences and a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, wrote, “If you guessed climate change was playing a role in this, you’d be right. Climate change isn’t just making storms ‘wetter’ in a simple sense; it is fundamentally breaking the region’s natural plumbing system.”

By this, he means as the atmosphere warms, it can hold 7% more water vapor. “If the atmosphere is a sponge,” he wrote, “then a warmer atmosphere is a bigger sponge.” Thus, the atmospheric river bringing water from the Pacific Ocean is warmer than average, hitting the Cascades and Olympic Mountains with more water than in the past.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that “human influence has contributed to the intensification of heavy precipitation” in North America, Europe and Asia.

Dessler wrote that much of the precipitation in our region fell as snow in the comparatively cooler 20th century. “Snow is safe…,” he argued. It sits on the mountains, “banking” water for when it’s most needed, in the spring and summer months.

Now, however, because of rising temperatures, it’s more often falling as rain, which increases the danger of flooding.

Rain falling on healthy forest slopes will be absorbed and slowed in several ways, Swanson reported. The moisture will seep into the soil or be taken up by the shrubs and trees in the area. The softened ground will be stabilized by the roots running all throughout.

But wildfires discard the norms. A severe fire, like the one that tore around the north side of Lake Chelan last year, literally scorches the earth and leaves a thick layer of hydrophobic soil (which repels water) behind, Susan Prichard, a scientist specializing in wildfire ecology for the University of Washington, said. Fires also burn off most plant life that would otherwise take up much of the excess moisture and hold the slopes firm.

According to the World Economic Forum, an international think tank, the global cost of climate change is an estimated $1.7 trillion to $3.1 trillion per year by 2050. 

The economic and social consequences reach far beyond Western Washington, including last year’s Los Angeles wildfires and hurricanes that ravaged Florida and Appalachia. Last year was the hottest on record.

The New York Times reported, “Around the globe, extreme weather and searing heat killed thousands of people last year and displaced millions, with pilgrims dying as temperatures soared in Saudi Arabia. In Europe, extreme heat contributed to at least 47,000 deaths in 2023. In the United States, heat-related deaths have doubled in recent decades.”

“We’re in a new era now,” said former Vice President Al Gore recently; he has warned of the threats of global warming for decades. “These climate-related extreme events are increasing, both in frequency and intensity, quite rapidly.”

Some will say it’s too soon to draw such a drastic conclusion. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates famously wrote in October that the “doomsday” view of climate change is wrong.

He urged placing human welfare “at the center of our climate strategies,” such as improving health and agriculture in poor nations, while reducing the difference in cost between products that emit carbon versus those that don’t.

Yet the increasing number of extreme weather events — and their cost, which I’ve addressed before — is a two-by-four being slammed against us. Will America lead the world in constructive responses and science as it did for more than a century? Given the occupant of the Oval Office, the answer is no.

The best we can hope for is climate leadership at the state level, including in Washington, Oregon and California, and from other nations.