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On April 7, 2026, a light drizzle began to fall from the dark clouds over the forests of Michigan’s lower peninsula. A spring rain, nothing especially unusual in a region of uncommonly clean lakes, the magnificent shorelines of two Great Lakes, over a dozen rivers supporting healthy fisheries, and so many places of solitude serenaded by flowing water.
Oh, there was one more ecological feature that set northern Michigan apart. It rarely suffered the extreme climate disasters – wildfire, drought, wicked storms – that seriously damaged so many other parts of the United States. The perception of being a safe haven as large as Maryland where just 800,000 people lived had begun to attract migrants from climate-wrecked states in the South and West to settle in northern Michigan, especially in the counties north and south of Traverse City, the region’s largest city.
That perception ended on April 7. The light drizzle steadily built into a drenching rain that fell on forest soils saturated by the melting of the heaviest snowfall in years, including a storm in mid-March that dropped two feet of wet snow. The first flood emergency was declared for Cheboygan County, along Lake Huron, on April 10. Over the next week declarations were issued for 39 more counties, from Mackinaw City at the northernmost tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula to Ann Arbor in the state’s southern reaches.
All that snowmelt and rain surged off the land into rushing rivers that crested two feet above previous record levels and caused the worst floods in the region’s recorded history. An earthen dam collapsed in Alcona County. A citizen brigade piled sand bags to hold the Homestead Dam in place in Benzie County, along Lake Michigan. Lakes and streams overflowed their banks, inundating hundreds of homes. Culverts washed out and water clawed huge gaps in important roadways, among them the Beitner Expressway just south of Traverse City, and the iconic Tunnel of Trees on route M-119 along the Lake Michigan shoreline north of Harbor Springs.
Flood damage in Cheboygan County was especially severe. A levee was breached in the Little Black River watershed that drains into Lake Huron. Ice that accumulated on Black Lake broke up and the floating pieces, pushed by wind and high water, slammed through picture windows of shoreline homes. It was an ice tsunami never experienced previously in the region.
Fortunately, municipalities reported no flood injuries or deaths. But the flood turned out to be the country’s costliest climate disaster so far this year. The financial cost is high – more than $800 million in estimated damage, according to early assessments.
Learning from Disaster
There are several unmistakable lessons from the flooding, each significant. First, northern Michigan is not safe from extreme climate disasters. No region of the country or the world is.
Second, the view that climate change is a “hoax,” a sentiment expressed in the White House and in too many other centers of influence – red-state legislatures, fossil fuel company board rooms, Fox News, county commissions in Michigan – is the assessment of morons.
Here’s why. Northern Michigan’s flood joined the growing number of extreme climate events occurring across the United States since the turn of the century. It may even become one of the billion-dollar disasters, whose numbers are steadily increasing.
The years 2023 (28 billion-dollar events), 2024 (27 events), and 2025 (23 events), already rank as the highest losses ever recorded, according to Climate Central. As of March 2026, the U.S. had already accumulated $12.4 billion in weather-related damages for the year, most of it from blizzards and ice storms. All this is occurring before hurricane and wildfire seasons set in.
You’ll remember some of the recent and worst climate-related disasters. In 2024, Hurricane Helene became the deadliest U.S. mainland storm since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, claiming at least 230 lives across seven states. The tornado count for 2024 also was the second-highest on record, behind 2004, with at least 1,735 confirmed tornadoes, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
High Toll
In January 2025 the Los Angeles wildfires burned densely populated neighborhoods, killing 31 people and causing $61.2 billion in damages. It was the costliest wildfire event in U.S. history, about twice the previous record, according to Baron Weather.
On July 4 last year 138 people – many of them young girls – died in the Texas Hill Country flash flooding when torrential rains from a slow-moving thunderstorm complex triggered a rapid rise along the Guadalupe River that inundated cabins, vehicles, and campgrounds. Overlaid on the raging climate is a mix of bad policy, mismanagement, and neglect.
Ever since 1988, when climate scientist James Hansen told Congress that climate change had started in the United States, I never doubted he was right. That summer I spent a lot of time on the Great Plains covering the worst drought since the Great Depression. Farmers were losing all their crops in the heat and rainless days. I was in Montana when Yellowstone National Park started burning.
In this century water scarcity has become endemic in the West as rains vanish, heat increases, and iconic waterways – the Colorado River, Great Salt Lake, Lakes Mead and Powell – recede.
I invited anybody I met who still raised doubts about the evidence of climate change to accompany me on my reporting trips to the expanding deserts of China, India, Mongolia, and South Africa, or to the melting glaciers in the Andes in Peru and the Himalayan peaks of India.
That there are American farmers, congressional representatives, White House occupants, fossil fuel industry captains, and ordinary citizens still uncomfortable with the plain fact that the Earth is rapidly warming is absurd. It’s an artifact of the boneheaded lunacy of our time.
So is current U.S. government policy to diminish support for renewable energy and electric vehicle innovation and products that are less expensive and less ecologically damaging than conventional fossil fuels.
Responding to the Absurd
So for the people in my region of northern Michigan, or anywhere else for that matter who retreat from reality, who support the foolishness of pursuing practices that are making the world more dangerous, I offer this. Don’t talk about the warming climate. That word just rubs some people the wrong way.
Instead, inform them of the millions of jobs and billions in revenue being lost as the United States retreats from renewable energy and electric vehicles, two of the most important industries of this century. And then remind them of China’s ascendancy as the world’s foremost superpower because they are capitalizing on such blindfolded attitudes while the Trump administration buries America’s vehicle-manufacturing industry in the ashes of ignorance.
Remind them of the cost of repairing the damage from ice that slammed into their kitchens and living rooms in mid-April 2026, something nobody in Michigan has ever experienced before. Then remind them of the unavoidable increases in insurance and property taxes they’ll have to stomach for repairs to their homes and community infrastructure. Show them that in parts of storm-ravaged Florida, Louisiana and California homeowners can’t buy insurance anymore to protect against the cost of extreme climate events.
In other words, show them the money. Where it’s going and why. Maybe that will break through the stupid.
Lead Image: Flooding in Traverse City, Michigan. Credit: Laura Herd / Circle of Blue