Hurricane Helene is a humanitarian crisis – and a climate disaster | Rebecca Solnit

The weather we used to have shaped the behavior of the water we used to have – how much and when it rained, how dry it got, when and how slowly the snow in the heights melted, what fell as rain and fell as snow. Climate chaos is changing all that, breaking the patterns, delivering water in torrents unprecedented in recorded history or withholding it to create epic droughts, while heat-and-drought-parched soil, grasslands and forests create ideal conditions for mega-wildfires.

Water in the right time and quantity is a blessing; in the wrong ones it’s a scourge and a destroying force, as we’ve seen recently with floods around the world. In the vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, noted that his state’s farmers “know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods, back to back.” Farmers around the world are dealing with flood, drought and unseasonable weather that impacts their ability to produce food and protect soil.

The rainfall from Hurricane Helene turned into a torrent on the Nolichucky River in east Tennessee that at its height was almost twice the normal flow of Niagara Falls. The water in that river and others overtopped dams and triggered fears that they might break. In western North Carolina, the French Broad River, which runs through Asheville, crested at an unprecedented level, thanks to dozens of inches of rain in the surrounding mountains draining fast into its tributaries.

Water became a violent force tearing apart buildings, streets and neighborhoods, and drowning humans and animals, while winds toppled trees across the region, the grip of their roots weakened by the rain-saturated soil. Roads, bridges, transmission lines and crucial infrastructure were swept away or smashed. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate that “climate change may have caused as much as 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Furthermore, we estimate that the observed rainfall was made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming.”

The sheer amount of water Helene dumped across its 500-mile path is staggering: 40tn gallons, one scientist calculated , the equivalent of pouring the entire contents of Lake Tahoe over the region, enough water to cover the entire state of North Carolina in water 3.5ft deep. “Water is life” became a key slogan at the Dakota Access pipeline protests in 2016, but it can also be a deadly force. One of the ironies of the current situation in Asheville, North Carolina, and other hurricane-and-flood-impacted towns is that water is everywhere – muddy, contaminated water – but with broken water mains, power outages and contaminated sources, water to drink and wash with is scarce.

Floods are not new, but the intensity and frequency of catastrophic flooding is. The climate crisis is a water crisis

There have been deluges in the region before, but this was a climate disaster. Around the world, catastrophic flooding is wrecking whole regions – perhaps the worst of all were the 2022 floods that covered a third of Pakistan, but the April-May floods in southern Brazil were a catastrophe that “displaced more than 80,000 people, led to over 150,000 being injured and, on the 29th of May, to 169 fatalities with 44 people still missing” as of June.

Repeated floods in New England and the Houston region are among the US’s climate disasters, while the UK and continental Europe, Japan and several African nations, including Mozambique and Kenya this year, have been hit hard by flooding.

Only last month, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, “In Chad, where an estimated 1.5 million people have been affected, initial assessments point to the destruction of over 164,000 homes, with all 23 provinces of the country involved, and Tandjile, Mayo-Kebbi Est, Logone and Lac among the most afflicted provinces. Over 259,000 hectares of croplands have been wiped out, heightening the risk of food shortages in a country already grappling with chronic food insecurity.” Floods are not new, but the intensity and frequency of catastrophic flooding is. The climate crisis is a water crisis.

Related: Our hurricane-hit islands deserve aid. The rules that block it are wrong | Guy Hewitt

We now live on a more violent planet than the one we left behind a few decades ago, the one we will look back on as peaceful, gentle, predictable. More violent, more unpredictable, more chaotic, more destructive, more dangerous. Some of that danger is heat itself, but water is proving to be a major part of climate crisis. The basic equation cited by climate scientists is that warmer air holds more water. “For every degree celsius that Earth’s atmospheric temperature rises, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can increase by about 7%, according to the laws of thermodynamics,” says Nasa.

Which means more warming will create more rainfall – but the climate crisis also shifts wind and ocean currents, making how and where that rainfall arrives unpredictable. The old terminology of “hundred-” and “thousand-year” events no longer makes sense, now that they are happening so often.

Behind the violence of climate-driven extreme weather is the violence of the fossil fuel industry, whose scientists clearly recognized climate change’s coming impact and whose leaders decided to go for it. Their signature is on these storms, on the smashed homes and smashed lives, the miles of mud, the pools of filthy water, the broken power stations and broken forests.

We now understand climate change, both causes and impacts, with precision, and we know what the solutions are, and we also know the obstacles to those solutions. None is greater than the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who serve it.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility