I noticed an interesting topic posted here today from another member of this forum and did not initially respond due to the holiday's busy schedule. During my travels today, I brought this story up with two other people, who are both ardent environmentalists, only to get responses I certainly was not expecting. I came home today wanting to share those responses only to find the topic was closed by the author, but I will not be deterred.
Now one can use this story as a blatant example of the problems associated with climate change. But we need to ask ourselves, is it really, or would that conclusion stem from a bias obscuring our cause and effect analysis?
Although I do believe in climate change, I do not necessarily attribute it to the cause of all environmental disasters.
The first person I brought this story up with was my soon to brother in law, who is an architect and lived in MD. We had an extremely brief conversation and his take was that this is a great example of poor city and county planning and the fact that the city is located between two hilly areas. This was the extent of our conversation before food was served.
Later on, I was speaking to my brother, who is as far to the left as you can possibly be, works in politics in PA, and often is ready (without any thought) to attribute any severe weather event to climate change. So when he too attributed this more to poor planning, I was initially surprised.
From what he read and heard from other environmentalists, this situation is due to over development of land up hill of the city. The elevated sections of the city have been paved over with traditional concrete and asphalt producing very little ground absorption and severe run-off as a result.
So, although it is daunting that Ellicott City is experiencing more flooding today then yesterday, we need to make sure that we do not blind ourselves from the effects of over-development and just automatically attribute flooding to climate change.
It is certainly caused a bit form both over-development and climate change, but which one has had the greater effect? It perhaps may be best to get a landscape architect's and environmental engineer's opinion on this before coming to any personal conclusions.