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Earth Matters : Can we adapt to increasing intensity of rain events?

By Christine Hatch

We’ve been hearing a lot about the “unprecedented” July rainstorms that have caused so much flooding and heartache for our farmers across the region. But were they really unprecedented? I don’t mean to diminish the real impacts by asking, but I want to be clear-eyed about what we’re facing. What distinguishes the effects of the climate crisis from the weather of the moment is an examination of trends over long periods of time. In order to quantify changes in our long-term climate, we look at the historical record of weather data, calculate averages and standard deviations, and decide whether the event we saw falls far outside the historical record of events or not.