Consequences

In another lifetime, I studied the science of environmental protection and management of resources.  I have a degree from The Pennsylvania State University that says Bachelor of Science in Environmental Resource Management, which is now over 20 years old.  When I was engaged in this course of study, the science surrounding global warming/climate change, was still very much unsettled.  Al Gore had written Earth in the Balance, which sounded a warning that climate change was real, the consequences observable and the phenomena of rising air and ocean temperatures were in large part caused by human activity.  In a class where we discussed such current events, the professors were not absolutely convinced that the data backed up what Mr. Gore and his fellow doomsayers were shouting.
Science has unfortunately caught up, and perhaps even passed the woes predicted 20 years ago. We are not headed for a Waterworld scenario (a science fiction work of the same era), but we are certainly seeing the consequences of rising temperatures.  In another area of my education, we studied soil conservation and community planning.  You know all of those weird little ponds that often sit at the edge of shopping mall parking lots, they're called sedimentation and flood control ponds.  They are man made, not as neat little homes for ducks and geese or landscaping features, but as a way to make up for the large non-porous asphalt surfaces and huge flat roofed structures which create a dangerous amount of runoff.  The runoff contributes to erosion and non-point source pollution as it washes everything from oil dripping from someone's leaking car to a child's toy that got dropped in the parking lot while mom was trying to wrestle her toddler into his five point harness, down stream into the sewers and waterways.
Those ponds are designed to hold that runoff and allow time for things to settle and the water to be discharged downstream at a manageable rate.  The ponds are designed for water flow predicted for either 10, 50 or 100 year storm.  In fact, those designations are fairly common in designing mitigation measures.  Can the safeguard handle the type of even that statistically comes along every 10 years?  A bigger storm than your average afternoon thunderstorm but not so big it will wipe out a city.  Can the safeguard handle a 50 year storm?  That's a big girl, the type that comes along mostly once or twice in a lifetime.  What about a 100 year storm? The kind that you're only supposed to see once in a lifetime.  The first decade of the 21st century saw several of these, which doesn't by itself mean that we are on the verge of a climate catastrophe, probabilities are tricky, there is a 1% chance that we have a 100 year storm in any given year and that 1% doesn't change just because we had one last year.  Hurricane Harvey, which just went all Noah on Houston, is being called a 500 year storm, which means there is a 1 in 500 chance of such a storm happening in any given year.  I don't remember ever being asked, even as a part of a lab experiment or project, to do a design for a 500 year storm.  To my knowledge, not many community plans include that level of caution.  They are designed by engineers weighing cost/benefit and using statistical probabilities to judge what is necessary.
The fact of the matter is that Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Harvey have both been called 500 year storms and they have happened in less than 20 years.  The statistical probabilities that we are using to plan our communities are getting trashed.  One data point doesn't hold much scientific value, but we are starting to accumulate a number of events that are pushing the consensus towards a reality that is not fake news or tree-hugging alarmism.
The thing about this is that we ignore reality at our peril.  If we continue planning our cities as though these events do not occur we are putting people who live there at risk.  If we do not develop mitigation plans and emergency response plans for these events we are committing malpractice and people will continue to lose life and property.  Denial does not help.
If we could slow or reverse climate change, great.  But for now, it is abundantly clear that we will need to learn how to deal with the consequences.