One of the weirder side effects of climate change is what it’s doing to rainfall. While most people think about global warming in terms of extreme heat—the deadliest kind of natural disaster in the United States—there is also an increasing risk of extreme precipitation. On average, it will rain more on Earth, and individual storms will get more intense.  Intuitively, it doesn’t make much sense. But the physics is clear—and highly consequential, given how destructive and deadly floods already were before climate change.

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