Tropical Storm Barry is part of an alarming trend driven by climate change, experts say

Parts of the South, including much of Louisiana, are bracing for potential catastrophic levels of rain this weekend as Tropical Storm Barry draws near.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) said the storm could strengthen to hurricane levels by Friday night or Saturday morning. But experts cautioned on Friday that the real danger associated with Barry is from the rains the storm will bring: A torrential downpour is set to fall on an area already saturated with water.

“If they push it high enough, it’ll overtop the levees,” Darryl Malek-Wiley, an environmental justice organizer in New Orleans, told ThinkProgress in advance of the storm.

Barry is expected to make landfall on Saturday, bringing between 10 and 20 inches of rain to the region.

Read the story from ThinkProgress by E.A. Crunden - “Tropical Storm Barry is part of an alarming trend driven by climate change, experts say."

Now is absolutely the time to politicize Hurricane Irma and other natural disasters

“Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn’t have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America’s poor deserve better than this.” - Michael Eric Dyson

This past weekend, Hurricane Irma made landfall in the United States, battering the entire state of Florida with a colossal reach of more than 400 miles. Making landfall as a category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds in excess of 130 miles per hour (209 km/hr), causing massive flooding and storm surges, resulting in more than five million power outages, and even creating catastrophic tornadoes, the damage it caused may well rise into the hundreds of billions of dollars. This occurred on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall in and around Houston, Texas, as a category 4 hurricane as well, marking the first time in recorded history that two hurricanes as powerful as category 4 made landfall in the same year in the United States.

Read the Medium story by Ethan  Siegal - “Now is absolutely the time to politicize Hurricane Irma and other natural disasters.”