From Chicago Tribune:

In a city built on a swamp, where rainstorms already flood basements and force sewage into Lake Michigan and local streams, climate change could make Chicago’s chronic water pollution woes even worse.

Researchers hired by Mayor Richard Daley’s office estimate that intense rainfall will happen more frequently in the not-so-distant future because of warming global temperatures, challenging the region’s aging sewers and the troubled Deep Tunnel project more than ever.

Rains of greater than 2.5 inches a day, the amount that can trigger sewage dumping into Lake Michigan, are expected to increase by 50 percent between now and 2039, according to a study by scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Texas Tech University. By the end of the century, the number of big storms could jump by a whopping 160 percent. Read more.