By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The Guadalupe River in Texas gets its name, according to one popular etymology, from the Arabic phrase, “wādī al-lubb,” meaning “hidden river.” In the early hours of July 4th, though, the river was anything but hidden. Intense rains caused a flash flood in the middle of the night, transforming the typically quiet river into raging torrent, rising more than 30 feet over its normal level. As the flood waters cascaded out of the Texas Hill Country, it left a path of death and destruction in its wake. As this goes to press, there are 120 confirmed deaths, and over 150 people still missing.

One of the first population centers to be devastated was Camp Mystic, a storied institution founded in 1926 that hosted generations of girls from Texas’ elite families. There were reportedly upwards of 750 campers, counselors and staff present when the floodwaters crashed into the camp sometime after 3 am. Cabins for the youngest campers, the eight year-olds, were closest to the river. Older campers stayed on slightly higher ground. When a wall of water 30 feet high crashes down, elevation matters. Many of the campers who died were the youngest, torn from their bunks, dragged downriver in the darkness.

The flood next hit the towns of Hunt and Ingram before reaching Kerrville, destroying homes, RV parks, trees, bridges, cars and anything else in its path. As dawn broke on the 4th of July, rescue teams began reaching impacted areas. Hundreds of people were rescued from the floodwaters, but no survivors have been found since last Friday, July 4th. Thousands of people have been scouring the debris left in the flood’s wake, searching for the bodies of victims.

While rescue and recovery activities proceeded, efforts to understand how this disaster happened have begun.

The core of early warning for floods like this are the weather forecasting professionals at the National Weather Service, a department within NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. President Trump has gutted NOAA since taking office last January. Despite the job cuts, the NWS was able to alert local officials about likely flooding. Kerr County’s top elected official, Judge Rob Kelly, admitted, “We do not have a warning system.”

Climate science has long acknowledged individual extreme weather events can’t be directly attributed to global heating, but that the worsening climate definitely causes more intense storms and droughts and causes them more frequently. The devastating flooding of the Guadalupe River is a case in point. The region had been in drought recently, which hardens the ground, intensifying the runoff from rainstorms.

The disaster occurred on the same day, July 4th, that President Trump signed the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” the budget reconciliation bill.

“You started with the Texas floods. We know that the climate crisis kills,” award-winning investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz said on the Democracy Now! news hour, commenting on the impact of the new budget law. “We also know that we have remedies: cut fossil fuels, transition to localized renewable energy and support frontline communities. Those programs have essentially been erased, to the best extent that they could, in this tax bill to remove tax incentives that would help us support solar and wind energy manufacturing. Tax breaks for consumers, producers, those were entirely stripped away to cut out that financial support for the solar and wind transition. Tax breaks, billions of them, to the fossil fuel industry. And remember, this bill extends all of those tax cuts from 2017, which had already brought billions of dollars to the fossil fuel industry, and just gives them new benefits.”

Trump’s attack on climate action will intensify the global climate catastrophe, accelerating fossil fuel drilling and burning, essentially guaranteeing more deadly extreme weather events will happen in the future.

Texas is especially susceptible to climate impacts. On the day before the Guadalupe flood, The Texas Observer, one of the state’s most respected investigative news outlets, published a piece by MIT management professor emeritus Henry D. Jacoby, headlined, “Trump’s DOGE Cuts Are a Texas-Sized Disaster.” In it, Jacoby writes, “Federal resources for managing climate-augmented weather disasters are being wiped out, and crucial information about future risks is being destroyed or degraded. Meanwhile, state leaders stand by while denying the seriousness of climate change as a driver of these events—and the threat this poses to the state economy.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, while ignoring the role the worsening climate catastrophe is playing in the disaster that just hit Kerrville, he understands politics. To that end, he just summoned the Texas legislature back for a special session. Leading the agenda are action items to address the state’s failure to prepare for the Guadalupe flood.

But, top of the agenda for Texas and the entire country should be the worsening climate catastrophe. Ignore that, and more severe and unpredictable weather events will only become more routine…and more deadly.