- Climate change makes a mega-flood twice as likely in the next four decades.
- According to a study, there would be 10 million displaced people, and even Los Angeles would be submerged.
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| Sacramento would suffer the most destruction from that mega-flood./ Wikipedia |
Los Angeles submerged, millions displaced... The great threat facing California, neither an earthquake nor a mega-fire
The consequences of climate change are gradually being felt in all corners of the world to a greater or lesser extent. If in Spain we are already assuming that the summers will be hotter, with more and more voracious fires, and with greater droughts, in California, they will begin to fear water and floods.
Californians have always thought that their biggest threat is the Big One (the possibility of a massive earthquake that wipes everything out because the state is on the San Andreas Fault). Lately, they have also seen how mega-fires, sixth-generation fires, threaten them. But it turns out that the biggest threat is actually a mega-flood. So catastrophic that it could submerge cities like Fresno or Stockton, parts of Los Angeles, and displace 10 million people.
According to a study published in Science Advances, climate change has already doubled the chances of a disastrous flood in California in the next four decades. For geologists, it would be something completely different, due to its dimensions, to everything that has been seen until today.
The impact on the US supply chain
What they have seen is that climate change supercharges intense rainfall events, causing flash floods to occur more regularly. CNN reports that this phenomenon has already been observed several times this summer in eastern Kentucky, Saint Louis, and even in California's Death Valley National Park. But, they warn, that what they announce could cover the entire state of California.
Climate change doubles the risk of a sequence of very serious storms, but each additional degree of warming will further increase that risk."
"Climate change has probably already doubled the risk of a sequence of extremely serious storms in California, like the one mentioned in the study. But each additional degree of warming will further increase that risk," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author of the study.
A major storm scenario model published in 2011 already showed that the scale of the floods and the economic consequences would affect practically all of California, Univisión details. The new research suggests that the area with the most destruction would be California's Central Valley, including Sacramento, Fresno, and Bakersfield. However, according to the US Geological Survey, the impact would be felt by the entire country because it would affect the food chain throughout the United States because the Central Valley produces a quarter of the country's supplies.
Storms at the end of this century could generate up to 400% more water
These megafloods would turn the California lowlands into a "vast inland sea." In fact, according to geologists, this phenomenon could have occurred before in the state. The difference, they explain, is that climate change is increasing the probability of these catastrophic disasters, causing them to occur more often than not every 25 or 50 years.
Repeat the mega-flood of the winter of 1861-1862
The last mega-flood was in the winter of 1861-1862. They were episodes of winter storms that lasted weeks and killed thousands of people. Flooding affected virtually all of California's lowlands, transforming the interior Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys into a temporary inland sea and inundating much of the coastal plain in what are now Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Climate change is accelerating everything. Eventually (the mega-flood) is going to happen."
Scientists have used new weather models and climate forecasts to look at two scenarios: what a similar storm system would look like today and by the end of the century. What they found was that, due to climate change, a flood on a scale similar to that of 1861-62 is now twice as likely to occur.
The researchers detail that floods of a magnitude equal to or greater than those occur five to seven times per millennium; that is, an annual probability of 1.0 to 0.5% or a recurrence interval of 100 to 200 years. "But climate change is accelerating everything. It's going to happen eventually," says Swain.
The study by Daniel Swain and Xingying Huang shows that storms at the end of this century could generate up to 400% more water circulating in the Sierra Nevada mountains than there is now.
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