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Climate change is making the way we talk about flood risk outdated - NPR

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Climate change is making the way we talk about flood risk outdated : NPR

Climate change is making the way we talk about flood risk outdated
Flood experts all use the same language to convey risk: 10-year floods, 100-year floods, 500-year floods. But those intervals are often misunderstood, and climate change is making them less accurate.

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What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet. 

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