Floods Are Becoming Deadlier. We Aren’t Worried Enough About It.

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1. July has been a month of floods. First came the July 4 deluge in the Texas Hill Country, which killed 135 people. Deadly flooding in New Mexico followed the next week. Then a record day of rain pummeled New York City, killing two people in New Jersey and sending waterfalls into the subway system.

   More extreme rainfall is a well-documented consequence of climate change, because a hotter atmosphere holds more moisture. With 3,600 flash-flood warnings in 2025 and the year barely half over, the National Weather Service is [likely to pass](https://theconversation.com/why-2025-became-the-summer-of-flash-flooding-in-america-261650) its annual average of 4,000 warnings before long. And yet Americans remain ambivalent about the growing risk of floods.

   This spring, the “[Climate Change in the American Mind](https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change-in-the-american-mind-beliefs-attitudes-spring-2025/)” survey from researchers at Yale and George Mason University showed that large majorities of Americans believe rising carbon dioxide levels are affecting a variety of environmental problems, especially extreme heat, droughts, wildfires, and flooding.

   But when asked to describe their own personal exposure to those risks, Americans’ concern level drops substantially. In the case of flooding, just 28 percent of respondents were “very” or “moderately” worried about extreme weather–related flooding in their area, a lower score than any other surveyed event except “reduced snowpack.”

   This reverse empathy gap shows up in data about other perceived social problems, such as crime, where respondents justify their media-experience dissonance by concluding that the consequences of an issue are borne primarily by other people.

   The data helps illustrate why it has been so hard to adjust to our new and very rainy reality, writes Slate’s Henry Grabar [https://slate.com/business/2025/07/texas-hill-country-nyc-flood-risks-extreme-weather-climate-change.html](https://slate.com/business/2025/07/texas-hill-country-nyc-flood-risks-extreme-weather-climate-change.html)

2. Keep chopping down trees and paving over open fields for cookie cutter apartment buildings so the slum landlords can make money. Concrete doesn’t absorb water but facts are inconvenient when you put profits over people.

3. It’s ok though because the government is currently working to ensure their donors are safe and the rest unwarned.

4. What’s the point in the public worrying? Governments and corporations are the ones capable of the necessary levels of change and they refuse to do so.

5. The flooding in Texas is just what happens every so often, and the people who built structures in the flood plane knew this but thought it would never happen to them.

   Our planet has been raging since the beginning of time.

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