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I was not saying that climate models would have predicted this.
What I think you have missed is that the climate is a global system and that there is a substantial amount of data to indicate that a shifting climate leads to a greater frequency of events that fall outside of local trends. This doesn't prove that the flooding event was a result of that (though some people may likely argue that point).
My point was that we need to pay close attention to monitoring and warning systems, that the article says exactly this, and that a wholesale rejection of findings from climate science is unhelpful because it is counterproductive to this goal.
I agree. Thus claiming a single isolated local event is the result of climate change without strong evidence (which in a chaotic system is usually impossible to collect) is counter productive because there is no data to back it up and in turn it make climate change look like fools who keep yelling about things that are false.
Which is why anyone who cares about climate change should refute every attempt to blame local conditions on climate change. We can state there is a trend, but we can rarely state that any specific situation wouldn't have happened without climate change.
It seems to me that a HN comment thread isn't really built for that, but here's my concern - it seems that the quality of dialogue and debate (generally, but especially in the US) has degraded to the point where it's really just about "yes it is" or "no it isn't". This leads to more division, infighting and the removal of much-needed nuance at a time when a more sober digestion of the matter is quite urgently needed.
Just to say, wouldn't it be nice if there was a forum where this actually happened. Perhaps if the air con was doused with oxytocin ahead of time or the participants had mandated micro-doses of something euphoric...
"Going back through U.S. weather station records dating to 1955, Kunkel found that rain over the past 20 years has become more intense in the eastern two-thirds of the country, including the southern Great Plains, where Texas is located. Intensities have remained the same or declined in the West and southwest.
At the 700 stations that began collecting data in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the highest proportion of two-day rainfall records have been set in just the past 10 years, Kunkel said, though that doesn’t fully reflect most Western stations, which were established later.
Nielsen-Gammon said the overall intensity of extreme rainfall in Texas has increased by 15% over the past 40-50 years."