#ClimateChange #complacency
"Although the changing climate is the biggest problem, the way we react to or ignore the changes could make a bad situation worse, experts said.
Marshall Shepherd, a University of Georgia meteorology professor who previously served as president of the American Meteorological Society, said people tend to base decisions on how they fared during past extreme weather events, including storms that didn’t end up directly affecting them. This leaves them overly optimistic that they’ll also fare well today, even though storms have grown more fierce.
He points to the Texas flooding.
'That is flash flood alley. We know that floods happen in that region all the time. ... I’ve already seen normalcy bias statements by people in the regions saying, well, we get flooding all the time,' Shepherd said, pointing out that the amount of rain that fell in only a few hours last week was anything but normal.
People need to shift how they think about disasters, even if they don’t live in the most disaster-prone locations, said Kim Klockow McClain, an extreme weather social scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research who studies communicating disaster warnings and risk.
'The message needs to be, if you’re used to some degree of nuisance flooding, every so often, look at what happened in Texas and realize that this is a shifting baseline,' she said.
(. . .)
As the weather has grown more extreme, our ability to prepare for and react to it hasn’t kept pace, the scientists said.
'Infrastructure is aging in our country and is more vulnerable given the fact that there are just simply, as a matter of fact, more people living in harm’s way,' Peek said. 'As our population has continued to rise, it’s not only that we have more people in the country, it’s also that we have more people living in particularly hazardous areas like our coastal areas.'
The Trump Administration’s mass layoffs and planned cuts to agencies that study climate and help warn of and deal with disasters — the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Weather Service and research labs at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey — could further worsen the situation, several experts said."
https://apnews.com/article/texas-floods-extreme-weather-attitudes-preparations-cc9d55c1f2440d78e01dcc65ec748112