I was living in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1980, and working in Tempe on the other side of the Salt River. Three months of record rainfall caused the river to get larger than the Mississippi. Nine of ten bridges across the Salt River washed out, and turned my five minute commute into a two hour commute. Massive flooding occurred all over Arizona, Utah and California. A tornado ripped the roof off the Fresno airport. Many people died when the I-17 bridge across the Auga Fria River collapsed.
CO2 was well below Hansen’s safe 350 PPM. Politicians weren’t stupid enough at that time to try to fix the weather by forcing people to buy golf carts.
I remember the 2001 Tropical Storm Allison (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Storm_Allison) and the devastation it caused in Houston Texas. Media didn’t report much on it and it was way worse (no offense) than what New Jersey just experienced. The entire downtown Houston completely flooded. 30,000 in Houston were homeless, 70,000 homes flooded and over 2500 completely destroyed. I had friends that lived in the area and they couldn’t believe how the media just completely ignored the entire event. Wait, who was in office then?
I was living in Houston in 1988 when Gilbert was forecast to make a direct hit. If it hadn’t of turned, Galveston would have been completely wiped out.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
I remember living north of Los Angeles in those days and having to rush home from work and sandbag the street in front of my parent’s house to prevent water coming in over their front lawn and into their house. Later in the week I hiked up into the Angeles Crest (national forest north of LA) and entire canyons had been reformed from the flooding. It was awesome.
In La Tuna Canyon their was a landslide across the road and they simply moved the road since there was such a tremendous amount of earth that had cut loose from the wetness. To this day, that is how the road is – it was never dug out.
Southern California is not generally known for extreme weather, but the late 70s and early 80s were very wet. There were times where it would rain, and rain hard for days on end. Then the floods. And CO2 below 350 parts per million – who knew?
I made a whole lot of money, cleaning up after heavy rains in Southern Nevada, between 1968 and 2005. I just thought nature was doing me favor by giving all those heavy rains. Some years we even experienced 3 or 4 One Hundred year events, according to the weather folks. I thought it was just weather as usual. If memory serves, it seems the extreme rains abated when the CO2 levels went up.
I should add that I thought the change was just part of the normal long term weather patterns that I had read about.