Friday, April 19, 2013

Bummer: In just the last five or six years, a new kind of CO2-induced storm has allegedly started hitting Chicago

Climate change leaves Chicago area in deep water
 It wasn’t a hurricane, but nearly five inches of rain fell in the Chicago area Thursday. "This is a new kind of storm associated with climate change,” said Tom LaPorte, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Water Management. “It's been around for five or six years. Other storms are rather local, but in this case the entire region got really walled.”...These extreme flooding events highlight an underling pattern of overall wetness over the past two decades, according to Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel. Angel said 7½ inches of rainfall has been used as a benchmark to characterize a “100-year storm” in the past, but said the number isn’t as useful anymore, as sizeable storms occur more commonly. “We keep getting hit over and over again,” Angel said. “I suspect it’s safe to call it climate change.” The trend has also been for more extreme cases of precipitation as opposed to temperature, he said.

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