> There is NO EVIDENCE that the central Texas floods are the result of climate change.
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.
It is unfortunate that people like you lean into climate change if there is a disaster related to any weather event without looking at evidence. In this area if climate change has any effect it is in the opposite direction - making these floods happen less often. You do discredit to climate change by blaming everything on it.
Climate is chaotic yes. However we can still look at trends, and the trends are if anything climate change makes these events less common. At least so far, only a few more decades of watching this area will say if that is really a pattern or not.
Either that or you need to show that the claim is incorrect. If floods are getting worse in this area show data.
You are right that the trend within the area does not point towards a greater risk of flooding. You are right to point out that we should only make claims based on data. You are, again, right to say that climate models do nothing to predict increased flooding in Texas.
I was not saying that climate models would have predicted this.
What I think you have missed is that the climate is a global system and that there is a substantial amount of data to indicate that a shifting climate leads to a greater frequency of events that fall outside of local trends. This doesn't prove that the flooding event was a result of that (though some people may likely argue that point).
My point was that we need to pay close attention to monitoring and warning systems, that the article says exactly this, and that a wholesale rejection of findings from climate science is unhelpful because it is counterproductive to this goal.
> that a wholesale rejection of findings from climate science is unhelpful because it is counterproductive to this goal.
I agree. Thus claiming a single isolated local event is the result of climate change without strong evidence (which in a chaotic system is usually impossible to collect) is counter productive because there is no data to back it up and in turn it make climate change look like fools who keep yelling about things that are false.
Which is why anyone who cares about climate change should refute every attempt to blame local conditions on climate change. We can state there is a trend, but we can rarely state that any specific situation wouldn't have happened without climate change.
This would be a great starting point for a much wider conversation on the various factors that lead to climate events leading to loss of human life (urbanisation, lack of ecological resilience, dependency on fragile supply chains, political inaction and misdirection, etc etc).
It seems to me that a HN comment thread isn't really built for that, but here's my concern - it seems that the quality of dialogue and debate (generally, but especially in the US) has degraded to the point where it's really just about "yes it is" or "no it isn't". This leads to more division, infighting and the removal of much-needed nuance at a time when a more sober digestion of the matter is quite urgently needed.
Just to say, wouldn't it be nice if there was a forum where this actually happened. Perhaps if the air con was doused with oxytocin ahead of time or the participants had mandated micro-doses of something euphoric...
Author uses a bunch of maps and charts to support their own narrative, one which all but ignores the reality they get at in the fourth paragraph:
> 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:
Can someone explain how did climate issue became a political issue in USA? It seems rest of world does not have this problem( but it's becoming a problem for rest of the world who follows US politics.)
Only if you ignore reality and redefine science with an absurdly narrow definition (mostly focused on trans folks) and ignore everything else. One side claims absolutely ironclad proven wrong things like "ectopic pregnancies can just be moved and saved", "vaccines cause autism", but because they have a narrow interpretation of sex and gender, they think that allows them to claim "SCIENCE, BITCH". No, just no.
It became a 'wedge issue'. A common tactic in 2-party politics is for a campaign to push their candidate to become indistinguishable from their opponent, and then pick one issue that divides the voter base, hopefully in their favor. It has to be something that your party can rally around and their party can't compromise on. Conservatives are generally pro business and anti government regulation, while liberals are usually pro environment and regulation, hence the battle of climate change.
Unless it's regulation around one's body, then they absolutely love it to the bone. Who can go in which restroom? What genitals you can have to be able to participate in what sporting events? What to do with a lump of cells trying to kill you? What to do with a lump of cells that has killed you? They have very strong opinions on that they will make laws for.
If you're going to be reductionist you should at least be consistently reductionist otherwise you're just making noise. The same argument can be used to justify any murder.
> Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations.[3] It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes. Some writers define sentience exclusively as the capacity for valenced (positive or negative) mental experiences, such as pain or pleasure.[4]
> Sentience is an important concept in ethics, as the ability to experience happiness or suffering often forms a basis for determining which entities deserve moral consideration, particularly in utilitarianism.[5]
For reference, a lump of cells part of fetus isn't sentient in any sense of that word you could imagine. A braindead woman being kept alive as an incubator for a fetus isn't sentient either. A mentally/developmentally challenged person is sentient.
Part of me feels like the state should prevent people from building in places like this but we already do so much of that people end up just living in RVs and parking them in places like this which is worse.
This is a lot for someone to wade through, especially non-American. I dislike those HN posts with AI content, but I did ask an AI to summarise and explain (culturally and geographically) what I was reading. Maybe it will help others.
Reading this just reminds me that you need to be involved in local politics if you want change.
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.
For a lot of these people the term Communist is basically a synonym for sick or evil. I have seen very extreme people using Communist and homosexual interchangeably as terms for what they consider immorality. "They're homosexual, communists trying to destroy America." "It's a Jewish, homosexual agenda." "What about Senator John Smith's wife?" "She's a homosexual, too."
The blame games on the climate and NOAA budgeting, Biden/Trump to blame etc. are just a smoke screen. The area is called Flash Flood Alley for a reason. The shallow soil, hilly topography, and local climate means that flash flooding is not an uncommon or unforeseeable event. So if local and state officials are serious about saving lives, there is one solution that they have the power to implement: zoning. Prohibit building anywhere within the high-water mark of a stream. Prohibit building anywhere water runs off (In Texas, they say, nothing is more dangerous than a dry creek bed).
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.
This article is juggling two topics that essentially aren’t related.
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.
New York Times did not got it wrong, the author got the New York Times wrong.
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.
What sort of _technical_ solution might exist to this problem?
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.
No.These types of things are unavoidable.
The full risk profile of our planet is immpossible to determine.
Should some great portion of the risk profile be determined, it will cover essentialy everywhere.
Even reducing it to stuff with a fractional percentage of a disaster per year will be forbiding.
And there is absolutly no way to impliment a country wide action and response network that does not end up running everything through the all powerfull department of saftey, which is politicaly and practicaly immpossible.
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 full risk profile of our planet is impossible to determine
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.
Each individual doesn't need the full risk profile for the planet, only a local subset. That's much easier to model and make assumptions. Like "this is a river, it could flood. How likely and how bad?".
At a very high level, you are technically correct - existence is inherently risky and, try as we might, we can't always prevent disaster from striking. Disaster will strike again, somewhere.
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.
It was avoidable and in fact, whole countries manage to avoid it. It took series of bad intentional decisions for this to happen the way it did.
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.
I doubt this sad event could have been avoided, looking back, yes things could have been done. But based upon how funding is chosen and applied and who people vote for, things would have to been done differently for the last 40+ years.
This could be looked at as a result for bad choices our elected pols made over decades.
>Are voters responsible for what their elected officials do?
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.
If you vote for people based on them defunding or preventing precautionary measures and then your elected officials defund or prevent precautionary measures, then yes. If the party says "I will cause harm" and you go "I like that because people I dislike will be harmed", then again, yes you are responsible.
I'm okay with a bad faith article as we get to see how bad information spreads and discuss it in the open. Sometimes the author learns form this which is good.
> There is NO EVIDENCE that the central Texas floods are the result of climate change.
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?
but how could he not have leaned into it
- 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.
It is unfortunate that people like you lean into climate change if there is a disaster related to any weather event without looking at evidence. In this area if climate change has any effect it is in the opposite direction - making these floods happen less often. You do discredit to climate change by blaming everything on it.
Climate is chaotic yes. However we can still look at trends, and the trends are if anything climate change makes these events less common. At least so far, only a few more decades of watching this area will say if that is really a pattern or not.
Either that or you need to show that the claim is incorrect. If floods are getting worse in this area show data.
You are right that the trend within the area does not point towards a greater risk of flooding. You are right to point out that we should only make claims based on data. You are, again, right to say that climate models do nothing to predict increased flooding in Texas.
I was not saying that climate models would have predicted this.
What I think you have missed is that the climate is a global system and that there is a substantial amount of data to indicate that a shifting climate leads to a greater frequency of events that fall outside of local trends. This doesn't prove that the flooding event was a result of that (though some people may likely argue that point).
My point was that we need to pay close attention to monitoring and warning systems, that the article says exactly this, and that a wholesale rejection of findings from climate science is unhelpful because it is counterproductive to this goal.
> that a wholesale rejection of findings from climate science is unhelpful because it is counterproductive to this goal.
I agree. Thus claiming a single isolated local event is the result of climate change without strong evidence (which in a chaotic system is usually impossible to collect) is counter productive because there is no data to back it up and in turn it make climate change look like fools who keep yelling about things that are false.
Which is why anyone who cares about climate change should refute every attempt to blame local conditions on climate change. We can state there is a trend, but we can rarely state that any specific situation wouldn't have happened without climate change.
This would be a great starting point for a much wider conversation on the various factors that lead to climate events leading to loss of human life (urbanisation, lack of ecological resilience, dependency on fragile supply chains, political inaction and misdirection, etc etc).
It seems to me that a HN comment thread isn't really built for that, but here's my concern - it seems that the quality of dialogue and debate (generally, but especially in the US) has degraded to the point where it's really just about "yes it is" or "no it isn't". This leads to more division, infighting and the removal of much-needed nuance at a time when a more sober digestion of the matter is quite urgently needed.
Just to say, wouldn't it be nice if there was a forum where this actually happened. Perhaps if the air con was doused with oxytocin ahead of time or the participants had mandated micro-doses of something euphoric...
Author uses a bunch of maps and charts to support their own narrative, one which all but ignores the reality they get at in the fourth paragraph:
> 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.
Can someone explain how did climate issue became a political issue in USA? It seems rest of world does not have this problem( but it's becoming a problem for rest of the world who follows US politics.)
Half the country stopped believing in science and keeps electing politicians who do damage.
An answer which fits both "sides" with each side claiming the other side is the one doing damage.
Only if you ignore reality and redefine science with an absurdly narrow definition (mostly focused on trans folks) and ignore everything else. One side claims absolutely ironclad proven wrong things like "ectopic pregnancies can just be moved and saved", "vaccines cause autism", but because they have a narrow interpretation of sex and gender, they think that allows them to claim "SCIENCE, BITCH". No, just no.
It became a 'wedge issue'. A common tactic in 2-party politics is for a campaign to push their candidate to become indistinguishable from their opponent, and then pick one issue that divides the voter base, hopefully in their favor. It has to be something that your party can rally around and their party can't compromise on. Conservatives are generally pro business and anti government regulation, while liberals are usually pro environment and regulation, hence the battle of climate change.
> anti government regulation
Unless it's regulation around one's body, then they absolutely love it to the bone. Who can go in which restroom? What genitals you can have to be able to participate in what sporting events? What to do with a lump of cells trying to kill you? What to do with a lump of cells that has killed you? They have very strong opinions on that they will make laws for.
>Lump of cells
If you're going to be reductionist you should at least be consistently reductionist otherwise you're just making noise. The same argument can be used to justify any murder.
Non viable non functional non sentient lump of cells, that clear enough?
[flagged]
You think mentally limited people aren't sentient nor viable? Yeah, you sound like a Nazi (T4 programme).
I'd like to hear your definition of sentience. It sounds like it's an unusual one.
> Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations.[3] It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes. Some writers define sentience exclusively as the capacity for valenced (positive or negative) mental experiences, such as pain or pleasure.[4]
> Sentience is an important concept in ethics, as the ability to experience happiness or suffering often forms a basis for determining which entities deserve moral consideration, particularly in utilitarianism.[5]
For reference, a lump of cells part of fetus isn't sentient in any sense of that word you could imagine. A braindead woman being kept alive as an incubator for a fetus isn't sentient either. A mentally/developmentally challenged person is sentient.
Part of me feels like the state should prevent people from building in places like this but we already do so much of that people end up just living in RVs and parking them in places like this which is worse.
I wish I had better ideas.
Wow I'm glad that one graph settled all of climate science such that it's now morally indefensible to think anything other than what the author thinks
https://www.reddit.com/r/TexasPolitics/comments/1ltnjf8/we_h...
This is a lot for someone to wade through, especially non-American. I dislike those HN posts with AI content, but I did ask an AI to summarise and explain (culturally and geographically) what I was reading. Maybe it will help others.
https://chatgpt.com/share/686cfd32-f578-800e-997b-1fbee9c185...
I found the summary valuable.
"People from Houston" is code for liberals for those who aren't familiar.
Wow, that is incredibly infuriating. Truly politics above all else. The political brainwashing there seems to be entirely complete.
How would one even begin to undo that level of programming?
Reading this just reminds me that you need to be involved in local politics if you want change.
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.
For a lot of these people the term Communist is basically a synonym for sick or evil. I have seen very extreme people using Communist and homosexual interchangeably as terms for what they consider immorality. "They're homosexual, communists trying to destroy America." "It's a Jewish, homosexual agenda." "What about Senator John Smith's wife?" "She's a homosexual, too."
The blame games on the climate and NOAA budgeting, Biden/Trump to blame etc. are just a smoke screen. The area is called Flash Flood Alley for a reason. The shallow soil, hilly topography, and local climate means that flash flooding is not an uncommon or unforeseeable event. So if local and state officials are serious about saving lives, there is one solution that they have the power to implement: zoning. Prohibit building anywhere within the high-water mark of a stream. Prohibit building anywhere water runs off (In Texas, they say, nothing is more dangerous than a dry creek bed).
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.
This article is juggling two topics that essentially aren’t related.
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...
New York Times did not got it wrong, the author got the New York Times wrong.
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.
What sort of _technical_ solution might exist to this problem?
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.
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No.These types of things are unavoidable. The full risk profile of our planet is immpossible to determine. Should some great portion of the risk profile be determined, it will cover essentialy everywhere. Even reducing it to stuff with a fractional percentage of a disaster per year will be forbiding. And there is absolutly no way to impliment a country wide action and response network that does not end up running everything through the all powerfull department of saftey, which is politicaly and practicaly immpossible.
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.
> these types of things are unavoidable
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?
> The full risk profile of our planet is impossible to determine
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.
Each individual doesn't need the full risk profile for the planet, only a local subset. That's much easier to model and make assumptions. Like "this is a river, it could flood. How likely and how bad?".
At a very high level, you are technically correct - existence is inherently risky and, try as we might, we can't always prevent disaster from striking. Disaster will strike again, somewhere.
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.
It was avoidable and in fact, whole countries manage to avoid it. It took series of bad intentional decisions for this to happen the way it did.
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.
I doubt this sad event could have been avoided, looking back, yes things could have been done. But based upon how funding is chosen and applied and who people vote for, things would have to been done differently for the last 40+ years.
This could be looked at as a result for bad choices our elected pols made over decades.
>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.
I wrestle with this. Are voters responsible for what their elected officials do? What about if you didn't vote?
If they are responsible then do they deserve to suffer for those poor decisions?
>Are voters responsible for what their elected officials do?
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.
If you vote for people based on them defunding or preventing precautionary measures and then your elected officials defund or prevent precautionary measures, then yes. If the party says "I will cause harm" and you go "I like that because people I dislike will be harmed", then again, yes you are responsible.
Why is this on hacker news...? An editorial opinion blog about a climatic disaster in a region of US?
Even typing out this comment feels dirty as it's against hn commenting rules.
However...this is 50 percent of threads nowadays.
Climate is science and peoples blogged opinions are posted here all the time.
Yeah, but not blatantly bad-faith ones like this.
I'm okay with a bad faith article as we get to see how bad information spreads and discuss it in the open. Sometimes the author learns form this which is good.