The Houston floods are causing so much disruption and misery mainly because of human decisions: putting such a large population on a flood plain subject to frequent hurricanes, and then taking inadequate measures to protect those people from the inevitable consequences.
It's the same story as Hurricane Katrina - and if more than 1000 dead in New Orleans 12 years ago didn't change the way Americans deal with these threats, the current pain in Houston is certainly not going to do so either.
Indeed, just a couple of weeks ago President Donald Trump scrapped Obama-era flood standards requiring infrastructure projects to take account of predicted global warming. There was no outcry.
Immerse a frog in boiling water, and it will immediately hop out. Put it in cold water and then slowly heat it, and the frog will not notice that it's being boiled. The evidence is there, but it's coming in too slowly to get its attention.
Climate change is creeping in quietly, making normal weather a bit more extreme each year, and Americans haven't noticed yet.
They get lots of help in maintaining their ignorance, of course. Right-wing "think tanks" like the Institute of Energy Research, the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, financed by the likes of Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers, have already mobilised to deny any links between the Houston disaster and climate change.
"Instead of wasting colossal sums of money on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, much smaller amounts should be spent on improving the infrastructure that protects the Gulf and Atlantic coasts," said Myron Ebell, director of environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (and formerly the head of Trump's transition team at the nvironmental Protection Agency, tasked with crippling it).
But do not despair: this is largely an American phenomenon, and the United States does not bulk as large in the climate equation as it used to. Almost all the other developed countries are taking the threat of large-scale climate change seriously, although they have left it a bit late and they're still not doing enough.
The United States will get there eventually, but it will take a far greater disaster than the Houston floods - the loss of Miami, perhaps? - before it ends the ideological wars and starts dealing with the realities of its situation.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world will have to cope with climate change without American help.
It can probably manage. The Paris climate summit of December, 2015 produced an agreement that was a good start in coping with emissions, and none of the other countries took advantage of Trump's defection from the deal to break their own promises.
New technologies offer more promising routes for cutting emissions, and the world still has a chance of avoid runaway global warming ( plus 3-6C).
Even if we can stop the warming before +2 degrees C, however, it's too late already to prevent major climate change. There will be bigger floods and longer droughts, food shortages and floods of refugees, and countries will have to work hard to limit the damage. Including, the United States.
■Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
