More Storms, Less Warning

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | July 26, 2025

The Big Beautiful Bill is big and it is a bill, but there is little in it or about it that is beautiful. Those of us who are not corporations or billionaires won’t find much in the legislation that will do anything but make our lives more challenging.

Let’s see…it takes school lunches out of the mouths of low income kids; strips away Medicaid coverage for most caretakers and creates a red tape nightmare for everyone applying; removes any references to climate change from government websites; ends tax breaks and grants for nearly all renewable energy projects; increases fossil fuel mining/drilling/burning; tries to sell part of national forests and opens them to mining and lumbering; created an immigration policy that threatens our ability to harvest much of our food supply; and much, much more by way of personnel cuts without regard to critical and essential departmental needs. (It’s why, early on, the folks who guarantee the safety of our nuclear weapons programs were all laid off, at least before someone realized that might not be such a good idea.)

And all of it is to find savings that will not go to reducing the annual deficit or the national debt, both of which will increase. No, this is just so corporate America and rich Americans can have their tax cuts made bigger and permanent.

Perhaps the most dangerous of the slash and burn budget cuts will directly impact the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), home to the National Weather Service. These are the folks who pay attention to and keep us informed about our weather. They issue advisories, watches, and warnings that help save lives. And it’s not as if we have a shortage of severe weather events.

In 2024 alone, extreme weather events that did more than $1 billion in damage killed 568 Americans and racked up total damages of $187 billion, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information (which may cease to exist shortly). There is every indication that those numbers will be worse this year, as supposed 1,000-year floods seem to be happening somewhere not once a millennium but every week.

In addition to the nightmare in Texas, we’ve had destructive and/or deadly flash floods this year in New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Kentucky, Missouri, Massachusetts, and Illinois, and it’s currently raining heavily in Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

NWS has already issued a record-breaking 3,358 flash flood warnings this year, 250 more than 1998’s old record, and we’re barely halfway through the flood season. It’s no minor thing, since NWS tells us floods are the leading cause of storm-related deaths, averaging about 127 fatalities annually. (The death toll this year is already well past that number with fatalities in Texas, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Virginia, and New Mexico.)

In fact, flooding is the leading cause of death in hurricanes, not wind damage, and, according to Nature Medicine, the death toll from floods has increased 25 percent in just the last 25 years.

Flooding is an unusually expensive natural disaster, too, requiring weeks and months of all manner of mitigation and rebuilding. According to the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, direct damage from flooding—buildings and homes destroyed or damaged and infrastructure destroyed or damaged—cost $179.8 billion in 2024 but swelled to $496 billion when including lost commerce and wages and transportation and public health costs.

The science is overwhelming to the point of near unanimity that this is not some natural cycle or climate phase. This is the human-caused climate change about which we’ve been warned for decades and have mostly ignored nearly as long.

There are going to be more storms and they will be more severe. Some places will experience drought and some will have almost non-stop torrential rains. More floods, more tidal surges, more tornadoes, more wildfires, more dangerous life-threatening weather events are already happening all around us and will continue and worsen. The warming oceans don’t just cause sea level rises, they also increase evaporation, which saturates the atmosphere and creates an endless cycle of more and more and more precipitation.

So, how does our government react to all of this? First they deny climate change exists and they put deniers into positions of authority. Then they hack away at the very agencies designed to alert and protect us from the bad weather already here and that which is still coming.

The budget at NOAA is being cut 27 percent, including 40 percent of NWS forecasting stations and 600 staffers. They will eliminate completely the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. They will decommission weather satellites. They will eliminate any reference to climate change from their websites and social media.

If they close their eyes and pretend it isn’t there, they seem to think it will just go away. It will not.