[tgrass]

From the comment guidelines: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

I accept that natural disasters are frequently politicized; And I love analytic discussions of political machinations. This comment does not seem to be asking for that.

[fennecfoxen]

I think it would be fair to say that if something like this happened to Sacramento again, lots of people would blame global warming, far in excess of any actual scientific understanding of a connection between global warming and the flood in question.

The precise ramifications of this excess blame are not clear.

[fencepost]

And it would be fair to say that most of the climate scientists talking about climate change would say that this could have happened anyway, but that climate change might well have made it worse. It's basically impossible to link individual events to climate change, the "change" part of it refers to trends.