The following was shared by the American-Statesman Editorial Board, Express-News Editorial Board on July 25, 2025. We wanted to share it with you and urge you to follow the link to see the maps and charts that illustrate the article.
“Climate change isn’t mentioned in Gov. Greg Abbott’s special session agenda, and yet it can be found throughout.
As Republican lawmakers consider responses to the July 4 flooding in the Hill Country that killed at least 135 people, they are unlikely to give voice to climate change, except perhaps with disdain or disbelief.
Yet when they discuss extreme weather, flooding infrastructure, alert systems, emergency communications, relief funding, and disaster preparedness and recovery, they will inherently be discussing climate change.
While climate change did not cause the Hill Country flooding this month, without a doubt it intensified the storm. Scientists are clear that warmer air leads to bigger rainstorms and higher chances of deadly flooding.
Take a region such as the Hill Country, whose unique geographic features have contributed to its nickname Flash Flood Alley, add warmer air, which holds more moisture, and you have a concoction to fuel thunderous storms that strike with deadly force.
To ignore scientific research on this point, to set aside climate models, is to fail to prepare for future storms, and then express shock and awe when they hit. Just as no public official should have expressed surprise — but many did — by the July 4 flooding given the known history of disaster along the Guadalupe River, no public official should express surprise about future dangerous flooding given the known modeling for climate change and extreme weather.
But this is Texas, where the oil and gas industry is supreme, and climate change denial is ingrained and pervasive.
Here is the central issue as the Texas Legislature deliberates: Republican lawmakers, so loath to utter the words “climate change,” nonetheless must enact policies and fund infrastructure that not only respond to the July 4 flooding but anticipate future disasters, whether or not they wish to name the danger.
If lawmakers fund an alert system but allow people to rebuild and develop in flood zones — to return to river life as it was — with little consideration for the confluence of climate change and extreme weather, they will deliver only the veneer of a meaningful response. They will be treating July 4 as an outlier, rather than a dire warning for a region with a history of deadly flooding that is also warming.
‘So damn dangerous’
The Texas Hill Country is especially vulnerable to extreme flooding due to the Balcones Escarpment. Running some 450 miles from Del Rio along the Rio Grande to the Dallas area, the Balcones Escarpment, which encompasses San Antonio and Austin, marks the end of the Great Plains and the beginning of the Edwards Plateau.
Its craggy and beautiful limestone hills can rise as high as 2,000 feet, sloping away from the fault line toward the Gulf of Mexico.
“Because this region falls loosely within the transition zone between the humid eastern section of the United States and the arid West, the climate can toggle between deluge and drought, an oscillation fueled in part by whether an El Niño or La Niña system prevails,” Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College, wrote in his book “West Side Rising,” which focuses on the 200-year history of floods and flood control in San Antonio and Flash Flood Alley.
Warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico also fuels flooding as it moves north and deeper into Texas, rising and falling with hills until the sky explodes.
“This cycle is called convection,” Miller said in an interview. “The more you have convection — almost like a circle: up, down, up, down, up, down — you create the context over the Edwards Plateau for these thunderous storms.”
When intense rain falls in the Hill Country — as much as 15 inches of rain fell in Kerr County in mere hours — it hits limestone and the rivers begin to rush.
When that rainfall interrupts an extended drought — also amplified by climate change — the flooding is even worse. The hardened, sunbaked earth absorbs precious little water, sending most of the deluge downhill.
“Water can cut through limestone, as it has done (for millennia), which is why the Hill Country is so stunningly beautiful and those rivers are so damn dangerous,” Miller said. “Because it creates these narrow channels coming through the escarpment.”
This serves as a baseline for flooding conditions.
It may be tempting to look at the Hill Country’s geography, cite its extensive history of flooding and conclude that this is simply the tragic way things are. The region has always flooded and always will. But climate change is in addition to these environmental factors. Think, “Yes, and” not “No, but.”
“Climate change, by adding water to the atmosphere, it’s loading the dice in favor of getting these really heavy (rain) events,” said Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric sciences professor with Texas A&M University and director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather. “This is actually one of the oldest predictions in climate science. It was made long before it was observed. Climate models were predicting this.”
This isn’t academic. An initial analysis by the research group ClimaMeter found meteorological conditions before the Hill Country flooding were warmer and 7% wetter than in the past.
Just as there is no shortage of after-action reports and news stories responding to past floods, there is no shortage of climate reports warning of more extreme rain.
The Fifth National Climate Assessment, published in 2023, warns: “Drought risk has been increasing in the Southwest over the past century, … while at the same time rainfall has become more extreme in recent decades.”
The 2024 update to the report, “Extreme weather in Texas, 1900-2036,” by state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, notes extreme rain in Texas is expected to increase by 20% in 2036, compared with 1950-1999.
Calling a storm a 100-year event means that in any year, there is a 1% chance that a storm of such intensity will occur.
“If extreme rainfall amounts increase by just 20%, the 100-year rainfall event threshold is exceeded twice as often,” the report says.
So, when public officials describe the July 4 storm as a once-in-a-lifetime event, that’s wishful thinking in a warming world.
“I think they need to rebuild with the idea that this is going to happen more frequently in the future, because we’re very sure it will happen more frequently in the future,” Dessler said. “And you know, obviously, that’s a problem when you live in a state where the governor literally won’t say the words “climate change.”
State of denial
While the catastrophe in the Texas Hill Country requires a unified response from local, state and federal leaders — the devastation stretches for miles — it occurred as all three layers of government are unified in their hostility and skepticism toward climate science.
The federal website that hosted the National Climate Assessment has gone dark. During the Texas Legislature’s recent regular session, state lawmakers championed legislation that would have hamstrung renewable energy, even though solar, wind and battery storage have proved crucial in maintaining Texas’ electric grid. And in Kerr County, climate skepticism abounds.
“Do I believe climate change was involved (in the July 4 storm)? Definitely,” former Kerrville Mayor Bill Blackburn, who served from 2018 through 2022, told us. “But that is very much a point of debate in this county. And it will continue to be.”
While we have no answers about how to break through with climate skeptics, the July 4 storm shows the devastating cost of denying climate reality. This brings us to the flood maps.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood maps are woefully out-of-date — Kerr County’s flood map was last updated in 2011 — and thousands of properties in Kerr County still fall in the flood zone. Beyond this, the firm First Street, which models climate data, has found that when heavy rainfall and climate risk are factored together, 4,592 properties in Kerr County are in a high-risk flood zone.
Yet the vast majority of properties in Kerr County and Texas lack flood insurance.
If the state is serious about protecting Texans from future floods, it must be serious about not only incentivizing flood insurance but also ensuring structures aren’t built in dangerous places. It’s horrifying that federal regulators removed buildings at Camp Mystic — where 27 children and counselors died, as well as the camp’s owner — from the 100-year flood map. That should never have happened. But it did.
The miles of destruction along the Guadalupe River provide a grim rebuttal to FEMA’s flood maps. For years, FEMA has been working to update those maps, using more current data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showing the likelihood of heavier rain events.
But local governments don’t have to wait. They can draw on that rainfall data now to identify flood-prone areas where development must be limited for safety reasons.
Meanwhile, another way for the state and Kerr County to get people out of harm’s way is to buy high-risk properties in flood zones.
Again, we can turn to history for precedent. Over two decades, Austin bought and cleared more than 800 homes in the flood-prone Onion Creek area, using local dollars and FEMA aid — vital support from an agency that President Donald Trump has mused about dismantling.
The miles of destruction along the Guadalupe River provide a grim rebuttal to FEMA’s flood maps. For years, FEMA has been working to update those maps, using more current data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showing the likelihood of heavier rain events.
But local governments don’t have to wait. They can draw on that rainfall data now to identify flood-prone areas where development must be limited for safety reasons.
Meanwhile, another way for the state and Kerr County to get people out of harm’s way is to buy high-risk properties in flood zones.
Again, we can turn to history for precedent. Over two decades, Austin bought and cleared more than 800 homes in the flood-prone Onion Creek area, using local dollars and FEMA aid — vital support from an agency that President Donald Trump has mused about dismantling.
And after deadly flooding in 1998 — 31 deaths across South-Central Texas — San Antonio Mayor Howard Peak directed the city to buy hundreds of properties in the floodplain.
“Had we continued to live there, we would have been flooded more than once since 1998,” said Denise Doyle, who praised the city for purchasing her home along Beitel Creek on San Antonio’s Northeast Side.
After the June 12 deadly waters that swept vehicles into Beitel Creek, we visited with Doyle at the site of her former home. Just from seeing the debris in trees, it was clear the recent flood would have overwhelmed her home. It was also clear the home’s demolition and subsequent flood control projects protected neighboring properties that are still standing.
“The 1998 flood, which was so devastating, actually produced one of the best policy decisions ever,” Miller, the expert on Flash Flood Alley, told us. “Which is, buy people out of the floodplain.”
Climate change is not on the agenda this special session, but it permeates every aspect of the July 4 storm discussion. When officials openly grieve the lives lost, or reflect on the properties washed away or the countless trees uprooted, they are giving voice to the consequences of extreme weather in a warming world. They may not say the words “climate change,” but it is inherent in every aspect of the discussion.
Should officials continue to deny this reality, they are choosing to invite future calamity. No one should be surprised when the next storm hits.”
This editorial is part of the collaboration between the Austin American-Statesman and San Antonio Express-News editorial boards in response to the Central Texas floods.
July 25, 2025
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