Tropical Storm Barry developed in the Gulf of Mexico, as this magazine still calls it, on the morning of June 29th. It was the second named storm of the season and, as such, it arrived unusually early; historically, tempests with names like Bonnie or Bob didn’t form until mid-July. Later that day, Barry made landfall near the city of Tampico, on Mexico’s east coast, and weakened to a tropical depression. Its brief life span made it the butt of weather-related jokes: “Blink and you missed it,” a pair of meteorologists wrote. But, it turned out, Barry was far from finished. Its remnants continued to wend their way north, carrying with them moisture from the Gulf. This moisture helped supercharge the rains that fell in and around Kerr County, Texas, in the early hours of July 4th, causing the floods along the Guadalupe River that killed at least a hundred and twenty people.

While Barry was making its way toward Texas, the White House was plotting destruction of its own. The Trump Administration has made no secret of its disdain for science, and on June 30th it recommended cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from projects aimed at improving climate and weather predictions. Among the many research centers the Administration wants to shutter are the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the National Severe Storms Laboratory, and the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations. The last two of these are based in Oklahoma; all are funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the Commerce Department. “I cannot emphasize enough how disastrous closing the National Severe Storms Laboratory and CIWRO would be—for ALL of us,” Stephen Nehrenz, a meteorologist with the CBS affiliate in Tulsa, posted on X after the budget proposal was released.

This week, as the search for those missing in the floods continued, many commentators raised questions about whether staffing shortages at the National Weather Service—which is also part of NOAA—had contributed to the tragedy. Nearly six hundred people have left the agency since President Trump took office, many because they were fired and others because they took early retirement. Among those in the latter group is Paul Yura, the warning-coördination meteorologist at the Weather Service’s office in New Braunfels, Texas, which handles forecasts for Kerr County. A story that ran on the weather blog of KXAN, Austin’s NBC affiliate, in April, when Yura announced that he was leaving, noted that he had “tremendous experience understanding local weather patterns while ensuring timely warnings get disseminated to the public in a multitude of ways.” Since the flooding, many meteorologists have defended the N.W.S.’s New Braunfels office, saying that its predictions were as good as could be hoped for, given the nature of the storm. Whether it would have made a difference to have an experienced person handling warning coördination—or any person at all, as Yura’s position remains unfilled—is, at this point at least, impossible to say.

What can be said, and quite definitively, is that, in a warming world, flooding of the sort that occurred in Texas will be more common. The hotter the air, the more moisture it can hold. This is a recipe for fiercer downpours, and, indeed, a trend toward more intense rainfall has already been documented across the United States. According to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, published in 2023, the amount of rain falling on so-called “extreme precipitation days” has, during the past several decades, increased by twenty per cent in the region that includes Texas, by almost half in the Midwest, and by a staggering sixty per cent in the Northeast. “Climate change is forcing a reexamination of our concepts of rare events,” the report noted. A study released this week by a group of European researchers concluded that the Kerr County floods bear the fingerprints of warming. “Natural variability alone cannot explain the changes in precipitation associated with this very exceptional meteorological condition,” the researchers wrote.

In a sane country, information like this would prompt two responses. First, steps would be taken to limit the dangers of climate change by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Second, more resources would be devoted to preparing for weather extremes. Unfortunately, that is not the sort of country we live in now. The federal government is openly trying to maximize fossil-fuel consumption—and, hence, emissions. On Monday, as twenty more deaths were reported in Texas, Trump signed an executive order aimed at further hobbling the solar- and wind-energy industries, which had already been kneecapped by previous executive orders, as well as by the provisions of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, approved by Congress earlier this month. On Tuesday, as the death toll climbed by another ten people, the Environmental Protection Agency held hearings on a proposal to scrap Biden-era limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants. Trump and congressional Republicans have put an end to, as one commentator put it in Forbes, “any notion that a true energy transition is happening in the United States.”

Meanwhile, the White House is actively undermining the nation’s ability to predict—and to deal with—climate-related disasters. In April, the Administration dismissed nearly four hundred scientists who were working, on a volunteer basis, to draft the next climate-assessment report, which is due, under law, in 2027. Late last month, it shut down the website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, where the Fifth Assessment report and its predecessors used to be available. It has cut off grants to climate scientists, kicked nasa climate researchers out of their offices, and hired climate-science deniers to fill key government positions. Trump has said that he wants to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Recently, the Administration has been backing away from this idea, but reports suggest that a cost-cutting measure at fema initiated by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, delayed the agency’s response in Texas. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies,” a D.H.S. spokeswoman told the Washington Post.

So far, Trump’s assault on climate science (and on so many other aspects of reality) has found eager collaborators in Congress. But, in the case of NOAA, the House and the Senate still have the opportunity to reject the President’s schemes. And perhaps, in the aftermath of the tragedy in Texas, they will find the gumption to do so. Because, as the death toll along the Guadalupe River has made horrifically clear, ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. ♦