“It’s what we expect more of in a warmer world,” Paul Smith’s College biology professor Curt Stager said on Tuesday. “And it’s directly the result of burning fossil fuels on such a large scale for so long.”

The flooding seen in areas such as Long Lake this week was caused by heavy rains. Stager said weather records show that the volume of rainfall has been building in the last century.

The mean number of local storms which dropped more than 2 inches of precipitation within 48 hours doubled from the early and mid-1900s to the early 1970s, according to a paper Stager co-authored with local science writer Mary Thill in 2010 for The Nature Conservancy, which cites data collected from a weather station in Lake Placid.

“You can have variation in the short term that’s hard to interpret sometimes, but the general pattern is towards more to this kind of thing,” Stager said.

Emergency Crews from the New York State Department of Transportation work to repair a flooded bridge in Long Lake on Tuesday. (Enterprise photo — Arthur Maiorella)

As the climate gets warmer, the atmosphere has more moisture in it because water evaporates from the oceans and the land faster, he explained. Then, when it rains, more rain drops out of the air because it is carrying more humidity.

Also, with more heat in the atmosphere, it becomes more active. Stager said heat makes the air above us circulate more vigorously — that’s what makes rain happen.

A more energized atmosphere carrying more water means more rainstorms, and more evaporation means heavier rainfall.

Stager said this is all caused by burning fossil fuels. Burning these releases more carbon dioxide in the air. CO2 is a “heat-trapping” greenhouse gas, which raises the global temperature.

Fossil fuel burning has also caused acid rain. Regulation of these emissions have limited acid rain in the past few decades, but Stager said carbon dioxide emissions are an unavoidable part of burning fossil fuels.

The home of Valerie Galvagni, pictured above, was partially buried in silt and mud from flooding early Tuesday morning near Long Lake. (Enterprise photo — Arthur Maiorella)

“The whole process of burning a fossil fuel is to release the energy by combining it with oxygen and turning it into carbon dioxide,” he said. “That’s what burning is, is taking oxygen and fuel and turning coal, oil or gas into carbon dioxide.”

Instead of carbon clumped in solid or liquid forms, stuck to itself, it is released into the air.

“We can talk about ‘clean coal’ and all that. It can maybe reduce some acid rain and things like that. But there’s no way to burn fossil fuels and not release carbon dioxide,” Stager said. “So we need other ways of doing it.

“The main solution is to switch the energy sources we run our civilization on,” he said.

The world is making that change slowly, he said, but it has to be done soon. The changing of the climate through unprecedented levels of fossil fuel burning on the planet has been going on for so long, at this point Stager said we’re sort of “locked in” to seeing harmful changes in the climate and weather. Now, the best people can ask for is just trying to avoid the worst of what it could be.

Emergency Crews from the New York State Department of Transportation work to repair a flooded bridge in Long Lake on Tuesday. (Enterprise photo — Arthur Maiorella)

He added that there are many other good reasons to stop burning fossil fuels, environmental, geopolitical and economic. He said it is not good to be dependent on other countries for fossil fuels.

“The faster we do it, the better,” Stager said.

A section of Route 28, east of downtown Long Lake, sits destroyed on Tuesday. (Enterprise photo — Arthur Maiorella)

Crowds gather as emergency crews from the New York State Department of Transportation work to repair a flooded bridge in Long Lake on Tuesday, July 11. (Enterprise photo — Arthur Maiorella)

A member of the New York State Department of Transportation works to dismantle guardrails on a flooded bridge in Long Lake on Tuesday. (Enterprise photo — Arthur Maiorella)

This sidewalk was destroyed near Long Lake Town Beach on Tuesday. Severe flooding Tuesday morning caused damage throughout the town of Long Lake. (Enterprise photo — Arthur Maiorella)

A section of Route 28, east of downtown Long Lake, sits destroyed on Tuesday. (Enterprise photo — Arthur Maiorella)