Mudslides set off by torrential rain killed more than 100 people, destroyed homes, and swept away trees and cars as they ripped through Petrópolis, a mountain city north of Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday. Ten inches fell in three hours on Tuesday, almost as much as in the last month combined. Climate change, mainly caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, increases the potential for extreme rainfall. “What we saw was a really extreme event,” said Cássia de Castro Martins Ferreira, a researcher at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, told the New York Times. “It didn’t rain — it was an extraordinary amount of water that poured down.” (BBC, New York Times $, Al Jazeera, Reuters, AP, NBC; Climate Signals background: Extreme precipitation increase)
