It rained a lot today. According to Environment Canada, Toronto's Pearson Airport saw 97.8 mm of rain fall before 2 PM. This is the fifth rainiest day on record; the record being July 8, 2013, which saw 126 mm fall. But today feels a lot like it did in July 2013. The same rivers, streets, and underpasses flooded. People needed rescuing. Cars got marooned. And more than 167,000 customers were left without power. I lost power in the Junction around lunchtime and it didn't come back on until just before 7 PM. That really hurt productivity, although I did manage to get in a workout during the outage.

Sadly, all of this is expected. The thing about air is that its ability to hold water depends on its temperature. For example, according to Nasa, a given volume of air at 20°C can hold 2x the amount of water vapor compared to air at 10°C. So as the earth's atmosphere warms, it is automatically going to hold more water vapor, and that means the potential for bigger and more severe storms. Some scientists predict that for every 1°C increase in atmospheric temperature, we should expect precipitation intensity during extreme storms to increase by about 7%.

This means that flood and water management are only going to become increasingly more important to all cities -- not just the most vulnerable cities like Miami. And it's going to require constant adaption as we figure out how to best manage the climate damage we've done. Of course, it's easy to want to do something about this on days like today when everyone is sharing videos of flooded streets and floating cars. But the trick is continuing to do something about it once most people have forgotten what July 16 was like.

It rained a lot today. According to Environment Canada, Toronto's Pearson Airport saw 97.8 mm of rain fall before 2 PM. This is the fifth rainiest day on record; the record being July 8, 2013, which saw 126 mm fall. But today feels a lot like it did in July 2013. The same rivers, streets, and underpasses flooded. People needed rescuing. Cars got marooned. And more than 167,000 customers were left without power. I lost power in the Junction around lunchtime and it didn't come back on until just before 7 PM. That really hurt productivity, although I did manage to get in a workout during the outage.

Sadly, all of this is expected. The thing about air is that its ability to hold water depends on its temperature. For example, according to Nasa, a given volume of air at 20°C can hold 2x the amount of water vapor compared to air at 10°C. So as the earth's atmosphere warms, it is automatically going to hold more water vapor, and that means the potential for bigger and more severe storms. Some scientists predict that for every 1°C increase in atmospheric temperature, we should expect precipitation intensity during extreme storms to increase by about 7%.

This means that flood and water management are only going to become increasingly more important to all cities -- not just the most vulnerable cities like Miami. And it's going to require constant adaption as we figure out how to best manage the climate damage we've done. Of course, it's easy to want to do something about this on days like today when everyone is sharing videos of flooded streets and floating cars. But the trick is continuing to do something about it once most people have forgotten what July 16 was like.