The Shifting Baseline: A Nation Confronts Climate Chaos as Warnings Go Unheeded

Good morning.

Across the United States, a disconcerting pattern of extreme weather events is rewriting the very definition of “normal.” This month’s horrific flash floods in Central Texas, which claimed at least 111 lives, including dozens of children at a summer camp, served as a brutal, predawn awakening. But this tragedy was not isolated. Across the past week, dangerous floods also struck communities in New Mexico, claiming three lives, and Tropical Storm Chantal unleashed its fury on North Carolina. Such events, once considered rare aberrations, are now, by scientific consensus and observable fact, becoming increasingly frequent and intense.

The science is unequivocal. Climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, is fundamentally reshaping our planet’s weather systems. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, leading to “mega rain” events where unprecedented amounts of water fall in shorter periods, overwhelming natural and engineered defenses. As Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer put it, “What used to be extreme becomes average, typical, and what used to never occur in a human lifetime or maybe even in a thousand years becomes the new extreme.” This “age of discontinuity” is visible in Texas, where the heaviest rainstorms now drop 20 percent more water than they did in the late 1950s, a direct consequence of a warming climate. Preliminary analysis indicates the recent Texas deluge was 7 percent wetter and 1.5 degrees warmer due to human-caused climate change; natural variability simply cannot explain its ferocity.

The human and economic toll of this shifting baseline is escalating dramatically. Globally, extreme weather disasters have jumped fivefold over the past 50 years, with fatalities nearly tripling. In the United States, the damage from major storms reached over $180 billion last year, a tenfold increase from the 1980s, bringing the total cost to nearly $3 trillion. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone almost equaled the number of such deaths recorded in the two decades between 1980 and 2000. These are grim numbers, particularly chilling when one considers that the warming of the planet has “scarcely begun.”

Yet, despite this grim trajectory, a perilous normalcy bias plagues our collective response. Experts in meteorology, disasters, and public health warn that society isn’t acting with enough alarm. People often base their preparedness on past experiences, leading to an “overconfidence” that this time will be like the last, or that disaster simply “can’t happen to me.” As Professor Marshall Shepherd of the University of Georgia notes, while Central Texas is “Flash Flood Alley,” the sheer volume of rain last week was “anything but normal.” This mindset, while perhaps a psychological coping mechanism, actively prevents adequate preparation, as infrastructure ages and populations increasingly settle in hazardous areas without updated planning. Many communities still rely on decades-old historical rainfall records from NOAA to plan flood control, even as those records no longer reflect the new, intensified reality of our climate.

Compounding this societal inertia is a deliberate and politically motivated “abandonment of policy” at the federal and state levels. The Trump administration has systematically sought to minimize climate danger and dismantle the very agencies and programs vital for understanding and preparing for these escalating threats. This includes proposals to eliminate all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs and reduce personnel, leading to the loss of “at least 1,875 employees… totaling 27,000 years of experience.” Critical NWS offices are “critically understaffed,” and essential data collection (like federal weather balloon observations) is being impacted. The administration has also canceled seminal national climate assessments, threatened to eliminate FEMA, and defunded FEMA’s core prevention programs. Most recently, legislation was signed that slashes tax breaks for wind and solar energy, and new executive orders aim to “claw back billions” in green project funding, effectively “hamstringing” the clean energy transition. This comes despite compelling evidence from states like Texas, where the ERCOT grid, with the most renewable energy in the U.S., has seen dramatically improved reliability and lower electricity prices, directly refuting the administration’s claims about renewables being unstable or expensive.

At the state level, Republican-controlled legislatures, particularly in Texas, have rejected bills that would have established statewide disaster response plans and critical alert systems, such as outdoor warning sirens that could have saved lives in Kerr County. Critics argue this inaction is influenced by donors in the fossil fuel industry. This deliberate choice to disregard scientific warnings and dismantle preparedness infrastructure effectively puts the blood of Texan children, and countless others, on the hands of lawmakers.

The message from the scientific community is stark: “This is our future.” The planet’s warming has barely begun, and the damage from even a few more degrees of warming promises to be exponentially greater. We are witnessing a grim reality where climate change is actively killing people and destroying communities across the United States. The current federal and state policies, rather than mitigating this crisis, are actively making life more dangerous, leaving a nation to adapt to an increasingly volatile world without the necessary foresight, resources, or political will. The question is no longer if these disasters will strike, but where, and how many more lives will be lost before accountability aligns with the lethal consequences of inaction