Large swaths of Asheville, including
Biltmore Village and the
iconic River Arts District were submerged under nearly 25 feet of water after the French Broad River overflowed.
But why did this happen? This "100-year flood" is no expression — the flood of 1916 in Asheville crested at 21 feet, a record that has now been smashed by Helene.
At maximum, I disagree with this assessment and at minimum I'm skeptical. This is why.
For one, the author cited the severity of hurricanes (as a result of global warming) as a reason for the flooding in North Carolina. However, per the author's admission, they define increasing severity as high winds (per the cited Princeton study) -- not flooding. A little contextual switcheroo took place in making that claim.
Secondly, in my opinion, what the author of the article is claiming is not science. This is true for a few reasons.
1) Due to inability of being able to isolate conditions of severe weather, they are incapable of creating a logical tautology that proves global warming is culprit of the severe weather
2) Given that hurricane season is well-established for centuries, there is little distinction between a single hurricane and a longterm of trend of hurricanes of varying severity dating back decades.
Given this, someone may be able to make a claim "XYX could be due to global warming". That
might be a valid claim. However, if you take any climate event in isolation and claim it's the result of climate change, it's inherently deceiving because that is not what climate is. Climate is the pattern of weather over long timespans. Nothing that took place here is anomalous or a smoking gun to that climate shifting.
I typed none of the above to prove that climate change is not taking place, but I think this is where skeptics also feel justified in their criticism because they aren't necessarily wrong about that.