As world warms, heavier rains are in the forecast

WASHINGTON — Summer thunderstorms in North America will likely be larger, wetter and more frequent in a warmer world, dumping 80 percent more rain in some areas and worsening flooding, a new study says.

Future storms also will be wilder, soaking entire cities and huge portions of states, according to a federally funded study released Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The U.S. in recent years has experienced prolonged drenchings that have doused Nashville in 2010, West Virginia and Louisiana in 2016 and Houston this year. The disasters cost about $20 billion a year in damage.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers pegs the true cost of the crisis in 2015 at $504 billion.

The figure is more than six times the most-recent estimate. The council said that its new estimate is significantly larger because the epidemic has worsened and some previous studies didn’t reflect the number of fatalities blamed on opioids, a powerful but addictive category of painkillers.

The council also said previous studies focused exclusively on prescription opioids, while the new analysis included illicit opioids, including heroin. continues to recover from its devastating 2010 earthquake, tens of thousands of Haitians will now lose that safeguard.

The special deportation protection known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, will be revoked for at least 50,000 Haitians living and working across the U.S., the government announced Monday.

The protection will expire July 22, 2019, giving Haitians living in the U.S. under TPS an 18-month window to go back to their struggling homeland or legalize their status in the United States. At the end of the period, Haitians will return to the immigration status they previously held, leaving them facing possible detention and deportation.

The decision comes 14 days after the Department of Homeland Security announced it was terminating TPS for 2,500 Nicaraguans and delaying a decision for 57,000 Hondurans.