For the record? Global Warming is projected to cause exactly the sort of flooding we’re seeing now in the Midwest.
The British and the Chinese understand global warming has driven their record flooding. The United States? Not so much.
Although you wouldn’t know it from most U.S. media coverage, the record “once-in-a-hundred-year flooding” the Midwest now seems to be getting every decade or so is precisely what scientists have been expecting from the warming.
A 2004 analysis [PDF] by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center found an increase during the 20th century of “precipitation, temperature, streamflow, heavy and very heavy precipitation and high streamflow in the East.” They found a 14 percent increase in “heavy rain events” of greater than 2 inches in one day, and a 20 percent increase in “very heavy rain events” — best described as deluges — greater than 4 inches in one day. These extreme downpours are precisely what is predicted by global warming scientists and models [PDF].
Hurricanes, Wildfires, Tsunamis, Floods, Tornados. We seem to have quite a lot of them recently. Since any specific freak weather pattern can’t be definitively proven to be caused by Global Warming, environmentalists hesitate to bring the subject up, but in the aggregate it’s clear that all the increase in extreme weather we’re having (especially flooding) across the world is caused by Climate Change.