Media reaction: The 2025 Texas floods and the role of climate change
Original article by Josh Gabbatiss, Cecilia Keating, Robert McSweeney and Ayesha Tandon republished form Carbon Brief under a CC license.
At least 120 people have died after a devastating flash flood swept through homes and holiday camps in central Texas in the early hours of 4 July.
The disaster unfolded after a severe rainstorm caused the Guadalupe River to swell to its second-greatest height on record.
Headlines have been dominated by the death of 27 children and counsellors from a summer camp for girls near the banks of the river.
In the aftermath of the flooding, many news outlets questioned whether the Trump administration’s decision to cut staff from the federal climate, weather and disaster response services may have impacted the emergency response to the disaster.
However, others defended the agency’s actions, saying that the appropriate warnings had been issued.
Scientists have been quick to point out the role of climate change in driving more intense rainfall events.
A rapid attribution analysis found “natural variability alone” could not explain the extreme rainfall observed during the “very exceptional meteorological event”.
Meanwhile, social media has also been awash with misinformation, including claims that the floods were caused by geoengineering – an argument that was quickly dismissed by officials.
In this article, Carbon Brief unpacks how the flood unfolded, the potential role of climate change and whether advanced warnings were affected by funding cuts to key agencies.
- How did the flooding develop?
- What impact did the flooding have?
- What role did climate change play?
- Were the forecasts and warnings affected by recent job cuts?
- What conspiracy theories have been circulating?
- How has the media responded?
How did the flooding develop?
The flash flooding began in the early hours of the morning on Friday 4 July, with early news coverage focusing on Guadalupe River in Kerr County.
According to BBC News, the US National Weather Service (NWS) reported a “swathe of around 5-10 inches (125-250mm) of rainfall in just three to six hours across south-central Kerr County”, equivalent to “around four months of rain [falling] in a matter of hours”.
The slow-moving weather system was fed by moisture from the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which had brought flooding to Mexico, before tracking north as it died out, the outlet explained.
Kerr County is a “hillier part of Texas than surrounding counties”, meaning that “moisture-laden air was forced upwards, building huge storm clouds”, the article noted:
“These storm clouds were so large they effectively became their own weather system, producing huge amounts of rain over a large area.”
Prof Hatin Sharif, a hydrologist and civil engineer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, explained in an article for the Conversation why Kerr County is part of an area known as “flash flood alley”:
“The hills are steep and the water moves quickly when it floods. This is a semi-arid area with soils that don’t soak up much water, so the water sheets off quickly and the shallow creeks can rise fast.”
He added that Texas as a whole “leads the nation in flood deaths” – by a “wide margin”.
As the rain lashed down, the “destructive, fast-moving waters” of Guadalupe River rose by 8 metres in just 45 minutes before daybreak on Friday, said the Associated Press, “washing away homes and vehicles”.
The Washington Post reported that the river reached its “second-greatest height on record…and higher than levels reached when floodwaters rose in 1987”. It added that “at least 1.8tn gallons of rain” fell over the region on Friday morning.
The floodwaters swept through camps, resorts and motorhome parks along the banks of Guadalupe River for the Fourth of July weekend.
A timeline of events by NPR reported that “boats and other equipment that was pre-positioned started responding immediately”.
The article quotes Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who said there were 14 helicopters, 12 drones and nine rescue teams in action – as well as “swimmers in the water rescuing adults and children out of trees”. He added that there were 400 to 500 people on the ground helping with the rescue effort.
By Saturday 5 July, more than 1,000 local, state and federal personnel were on the ground helping with the rescue operation, NPR said.
In the days that followed, further periods of heavy rainfall meant that flood watches remained in place for much of the weekend, said Bloomberg.
Newspapers and online outlets were filled with images from the area. For example, the Sunday Times carried photos and video footage of the floods, while BBC News had drone footage of the “catastrophic flooding”.
What impact did the flooding have?
The floods have killed at least 119 people, according to the latest count reports by the Guardian:
“In Kerr county, the area that was worst affected by last Friday’s flood, officials said on Wednesday morning that 95 people had died. The other 24 people who have died are from surrounding areas. The Kerr county sheriff said 59 adults and 36 children had died, with 27 bodies still unidentified.”
There are also 173 people believed to still be missing, the Guardian said, including 161 from Kerr County specifically.
Bloomberg noted that “some of the victims came from additional storms around the state capital Austin on 5 July”. It added that, according to officials, “no one had been found alive since 4 July, when the deluge arrived in the pre-dawn hours”.
BBC News reported that continuing rains following the initial flood “hamper[ed] rescue teams who are already facing venomous snakes as they sift through mud and debris”.
Headlines have been dominated by the death of 27 children and counsellors from Camp Mystic – a 700-acre summer camp for girls, which has been running for almost 100 years, noted the Guardian.
BBC News reported that “many of the hundreds of girls at the camp were sleeping in low-lying cabins less than 500ft (150 metres) from the riverbank”.
Lieutenant governor Patrick “told of one heroic camp counsellor who smashed a window so girls in their pyjamas could swim out through neck-high water”, the outlet reported. He added that “these little girls, they swam for about 10 or 15 minutes” before reaching safety.
The Associated Press reported:
“Dozens of families shared in local Facebook groups that they received devastating phone calls from safety officials informing them that their daughters had not yet been located among the washed-away camp cabins and downed trees. Camp Mystic said in an email to parents of the roughly 750 campers that if they have not been contacted directly, their child is accounted for.”
The New York Times published images and videos of the aftermath at the summer camp.
Visiting the site on Sunday 6 July, Texas governor Greg Abbott tweeted that the camp was “horrendously ravaged in ways unlike I’ve seen in any natural disaster”.
In the immediate aftermath of the floods, US president Donald Trump, at his golf club in Bedminster in New Jersey, signed a major disaster declaration that freed up resources for the state, reported France24.
A preliminary estimate by the private weather service AccuWeather put the damage and economic loss at $18bn-$22bn (£13.2bn-£16.2bn), the Guardian reported.
Former president Barack Obama described the events as “absolutely heartbreaking”, reported the Hill. In a statement, former president George W Bush and his wife Laura – who was once a counselor at the camp – said that they “are heartbroken by the loss of life and the agony so many are feeling”, another Hill article reported.
American-born pontiff Pope Leo XIV also “voiced his sympathies”, reported another Guardian article. Speaking at the Vatican, he said:
“I would like to express sincere condolences to all the families who have lost loved ones, in particular their daughters who were in a summer camp in the disaster caused by flooding of the Guadalupe River in Texas.”
What role did climate change play?
As the planet warms, extreme rainfall events are becoming more intense in many parts of the world.
This is principally because, according to the Clausius-Clapeyron (C-C) equation, the air is able to hold 7% more moisture for every 1C that the atmosphere warms, which means warmer air can release more liquid water when it rains.
For example, a recent study of the US found that the frequency of heavy rainfall at “durations from hourly to daily increased in 1949-2020”. It added that this was “likely inconsistent with natural climate variability”.
In addition, research indicates that, in some parts of the world, increases in the intensity of extreme rainfall over 1-3 hours are “stronger” than would be expected from the C-C scaling.
However, many other factors – such as local weather patterns and land use – affect whether extreme rainfall leads to flooding.
Local meteorologist Cary Burgess told Newsweek that “this part of the Texas Hill Country is very prone to flash flooding because of the rugged terrain and rocky landscape”. For example, the outlet notes, 10 teenagers died in flash floods in July 1987.
In the aftermath of the flooding in Texas, Dr Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, told ABC News that there is “abundant evidence” that “highly extreme rain events” have “already increased considerably around the world as a result of the warming that’s already occurred”.
Prof Andrew Dessler from Texas A&M University wrote on climate science newsletter The Climate Brink that “more water in the air flowing into the storm will lead to more intense rainfall”. He added:
“The role of climate change is like steroids for the weather – it injects an extra dose of intensity into existing weather patterns.”
Dr Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told Bloomberg that Texas is “particularly flood-prone because the fever-hot Gulf of Mexico is right next door, providing plenty of tropical moisture to fuel storms when they come along”.
Many outlets pointed out the higher-than-average sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. BBC News said:
“Sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, where some of the air originated from, continue to be warmer than normal. Warmer waters mean more evaporation and so more available moisture in the atmosphere to feed a storm.”
Yale Climate Connections reported that sea surface temperatures were up to 1C above average in the central Gulf of Mexico. It said that human-caused climate change made these conditions up to 10 times more likely, according to the Climate Shift Index from Climate Central.
(This index gives the ratio of how common the temperature is in today’s climate, compared to how likely it would be in a world without climate change.)
Bloomberg was among a number of outlets to note that, in the run-up to the flooding, nearly 90% of Kerr County was experiencing “extreme” or “exceptional” drought. This meant the soil was hard and less able to soak in water when the intense rainfall arrived.
Just days after the event, rapid attribution group ClimaMeter published an analysis of the meteorological conditions that led to the flooding.
It stated that “conditions similar to those of the July 2025 Texas floods are becoming more favorable for extreme precipitation, in line with what would be expected under continued global warming”.
According to the analysis, the flooding was a “very exceptional meteorological event”. It explained that “meteorological conditions” similar to those that caused the floods are “up to 2 mm/day (up to 7%) wetter in the present than they have been in the past”. It added:
“Natural variability alone cannot explain the changes in precipitation associated with this very exceptional meteorological condition.”
The field of extreme weather attribution aims to find the “fingerprint” of climate change in extreme events such as floods, droughts and heatwaves.
ClimaMeter focuses on the atmospheric circulation patterns that cause an extreme event – for example, a low-pressure system in a particular region. Once an event is defined, the scientists search the historical record to find events with similar circulation patterns to calculate how the intensity of the events has changed over time.
The study authors warned that they have “low confidence in the robustness” of their conclusions for this study, because the event is “very exceptional in the data record”, so they do not have many past events to compare it to.
In its coverage of the attribution study, the Wall Street Journal highlighted some of the research’s limitations. It said:
“Remnant moisture from Tropical Storm Barry stalled over the region and repeatedly fed rainfall, making it hard to compare the weather pattern to historical data.”
The outlet quoted one of the study’s co-authors, Dr Davide Faranda, a scientist at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, who said the data “nonetheless suggests that climate change played a role”.
Many other climate scientists have also linked the flooding to climate change.
For example, Dr Leslie Mabon, a senior lecturer in environmental systems at the Open University, told the Science Media Centre:
“The Texas floods point to two issues. One is that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster – and one area that disaster experts will be probing is what warnings were given and when. The second is that the pace and scale of climate change means extreme events can and do exceed what our infrastructure and built environment is able to cope with.”
Were the forecasts and warnings affected by recent job cuts?
Observers were quick to question how the response to the floods has been impacted by recent sweeping cuts to federal climate, weather and disaster response services by the Trump administration.
BBC News explained how staffing cuts overseen by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency – the initiative formerly led by Elon Musk – have reduced the workforce National Weather Service (NWS).
The news outlet reported that – since the start of the year – “most” probationary employees had their contracts terminated, 200 employees have taken voluntary redundancy, 300 opted for early retirement and 100 were “ultimately fired”.
(The Trump administration has also proposed a 25% cut to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – the agency which oversees the NWS – but this would not come into force until the 2026 financial year.)
The Independent was among a raft of publications to report the weather service had predicted 1-3 inches (2.5-7.6cm) of rain for the region – significantly less than the 10-15 inches (25-38cm) that ultimately fell.
CNN detailed how the first “life-threatening flash flooding warning” for parts of Kerr County – which would have triggered alerts to mobile phones in the area – was issued just past 1am on Friday morning by the NWS. This was 12 hours after the first flash flood warning and followed “several technical forecasts” issued on Thursday afternoon and evening with “increasingly heightened language”, it said.
Other publications focused on staffing shortages at local branches of the weather service. The New York Times and Guardian were among the outlets who reported that “key staff members” had been missing at the two Texas NWS offices involved in forecasting and warning for the affected region. This included a “warning coordination” officer.
Writing on social media platform BlueSky, Dr Daniel Swain – the climate scientist from the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources – said claims that the weather service “did not foresee” the floods were “simply not true”. He stated:
“This truly was a sudden and massive event and occurred at [the] worst possible time (middle of the night). But [the] problem, once again, was not a bad weather prediction: it was one of “last mile” forecast/warning dissemination.
“I am not aware of the details surrounding staffing levels at the local NWS offices involved, nor how that might have played into [the] timing/sequence of warnings involved. But I do know that locations that flooded catastrophically had at least 1-2+ hours of direct warning from NWS.”
Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA over 2021-25, speculated that the communication problems could have been caused by staffing shortages. He told the Hill:
“I do think the cuts are contributing to the inability of emergency managers to respond…The weather service did a really good job, actually, in getting watches and warnings and…wireless emergency alerts out.
“It is really a little early to give a specific analysis of where things might have broken down, but from what I’ve seen, it seems like the communications breakdown in the last mile is where most of the problem was.”
The Trump administration, meanwhile, was quick to push back on the suggestion that budget and job cuts to climate and weather services had aggravated the situation.
In an official statement provided to Axios, a White House spokesperson said criticisms of the NWS and funding cut accusations were “shameful and disgusting”. It added:
“False claims about the NWS have been repeatedly debunked by meteorologists, experts and other public reporting. The NWS did their job, even issuing a flood watch more than 12 hours in advance.”
Meanwhile, when a reporter asked Trump whether the administration would investigate whether recent cuts had led to “key” vacancies at the NWS, he responded that “they did not”.
Asked if he thought federal meteorologists should be rehired, Trump said:
“I would think not. This was the thing that happened in seconds. Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it.”
Media outlets highlighted how the disaster put a spotlight on the risks of forthcoming federal cuts to NOAA and the government’s plans to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The Guardian reported on warnings that such floods could become the “new normal” as “Trump and his allies dismantle crucial federal agencies that help states prepare and respond to extreme weather and other hazards”.
Dr Samantha Montano, professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told the outlet.
“This is what happens when you let climate change run unabated and break apart the emergency management system – without investing in that system at the local and state level.”
CBS News reported about how, in 2017, Kerr County officials rejected proposals to install an outdoor warning system for floods on the grounds of cost. The outlet noted that neighbouring counties Guadalupe and Comal both have flood sirens in place.
What conspiracy theories have been circulating?
As with many other natural disasters, the floods have been followed by a wave of fast-spreading online misinformation.
One of the most popular theories to have taken hold is that the floods were caused by cloud seeding – a form of geoengineering where substances are purposefully introduced into the clouds to enhance rainfall.
In a pair of Twitter posts, each viewed by several million people, one account claimed the state of Texas was “running seven massive cloud seeding programs” and asked: “Did they push the clouds too far and trigger this flood?”
It also linked the floods and cloud seeding operations conducted by Rainmaker Technology Corporation, a weather modification start-up partly funded by US billionaire Peter Thiel.
Rainmaker Technology Corporation CEO Augustus Doricko found himself in the eye of the social media storm, as social media users pointed to his organisation’s links to Thiel and shared a photo of the businessman with former US president Bill Clinton.
The cloud seeding theory received a major boost when it was promoted by Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national security advisor and one of the “most integral figures in the QAnon movement”, according to the Guardian.
The weather modification theory was picked up by existing and prospective Republican politicians.
The Daily Beast reported how Kandiss Taylor – a Republican congressional candidate in Georgia – blamed the event on “fake weather” in a string of tweets. She wrote: “This isn’t just ‘climate change.’ It’s cloud seeding, geoengineering, & manipulation.”
Meanwhile, sitting Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Twitter that she had introduced a bill that “prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity”.
(This is not Taylor Greene’s first foray into weather manipulation conspiracies. In 2021, she postulated that Jewish bankers had started deadly fires in California in 2018 by firing a laser from space in order to benefit themselves financially.)
Meteorologists were quick to debunk the claims around cloud seeding. In a Facebook post, chief meteorologist for Texas news station ABC13 wrote:
“Cloud seeding cannot create a storm of this magnitude or size. In fact, cloud seeding cannot even create a single cloud. All it can do is take an existing cloud and enhance the rainfall by up to 20%.”
At a press conference on Monday, Texas senator Ted Cruz said there was “zero evidence of anything like weather modification”. He added:
“The internet can be a strange place. People can come up with all sorts of crazy theories.”
Theories about geoengineering were not the only form of misinformation to swirl online in the wake of the disaster.
Snopes reported how local outlet Kerr County Lead pulled a story about two girls rescued 30 metres up a tree two days after the flood event after the account was found to be false.
The story, which cited “sources on the ground”, was circulated widely on Twitter and replicated by other news outlets, including the Daily Mirror and Manchester Evening News in the UK. Both outlets subsequently deleted the articles.
In a retraction statement, the editor of Kerr County Lead said the story was a “classic tale of misinformation that consumes all of us during a natural disaster”.
Another widely-circulated story – debunked by Snopes – claimed that musician Eric Clapton would pay funeral expenses for the families of those killed.
How has the media responded?
The scale of flooding and the resulting death toll have prompted many news outlets to ask whether more could have been done to avoid the tragedy.
Newspapers in Texas highlighted perceived failures by local, state and federal authorities.
“Flash floods happen frequently enough in the Hill Country that many Texans rightly wonder whether at least some of the devastation and death…could have been prevented,” the Dallas Morning News said. “Answers must follow,” agreed the Austin American-Statesman.
An editorial in the San Antonio Express-News said there would likely be “plenty of finger-pointing”, arguing that “people will try to push narratives that serve political and personal agendas”. It added:
“The truth may reveal inevitability, failure or something in between.”
An editorial in the Houston Chronicle criticised “misguided decisions” by Trump to cut support for the “federal agencies that keep us safe from storms”. It stated:
“What will protect Texans is a fully staffed, fully supported weather service – with the scientists and infrastructure in place to warn us in time.”
While none of these Texan newspaper editorials pointed to a potential role for climate change in exacerbating the extreme rainfall, some of their wider reporting on the disaster did.
Other US news outlets, such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post emphasised this link in their coverage.
“We hope this tragedy will lead to renewed support for the systems we’ve devised over the years to help prepare for and respond to natural disasters,” Louisiana’s New Orleans Advocate stated in an editorial, adding that “we all are vulnerable to increasingly extreme weather events caused by climate change”.
In Pennsylvania, a Patriot-News editorial said that, following the floods, “government officials at all levels need to accept the reality of climate change. Too many do not.”
Writing in his news outlet, Bloomberg, businessman and former Democratic presidential nominee Michael Bloomberg made a direct link between the “climate denialism” of the Trump administration and the disaster in Texas.
The New York Times has an opinion piece on the floods by MaryAnn Tierney, former regional administrator at the FEMA. Besides making a clear link to climate change, Tierney stated that:
“The uncomfortable truth is this: With each passing day, the federal government is becoming less prepared to face the next big disaster.”
More overtly right-leaning and Trump-supporting media outlets in the US took aim at “left-wing critics” for linking the event to climate change and Trump administration cuts.
An article in Fox News, which has broadcast discussions of flood-related conspiracy theories, criticised “liberals” for “politicising the disastrous flooding”.
An editorial in the New York Post is headlined: “Lefty responses to the Texas flooding horror are demented and depraved.” It argued that Democrats had “wrongly suggest[ed] that Team Trump slowed the disaster response”.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, from the climate-sceptic Heritage Foundation, wrote in the UK’s Daily Telegraph that Democrats were trying to “politicise mother nature” by linking weather-service cuts to the deaths in Texas.
Meanwhile, Guardian columnist Rebecca Solnit urged caution in definitively linking the floods to any specific political issue amid “the information onslaughts of this moment”. She concluded that “both the weather and the news require vigilance.”
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