The inspiration for this post came from reading the following:

“Climate Change cost the U.S. more than $500 billion in direct damage over the last five years, and the price is rising.” - “Accounting for the Future” by Joanna Foster/ Environmental Defense Fund Solutions Newsletter Summer 2021

My first reaction to the above statement was how the author came up with the figure of $500 billion. She did not elaborate nor provide a link or reference, so I googled “$500 billion climate change damage” and this is what I found:

“And the cost is just huge. So in the last five years, the U.S. has experienced more than $500 billion - with a B - in losses directly from climate-fueled weather disasters. And that's not including 2020's disasters that will likely be in the tens of billions.” Rebecca Hersher, interviewed in “What Are The Costs Of Climate Change?”/ NPR September 16, 2020

Again, no elaboration, no link, no reference. Also, no follow-up questions by the interviewer, like “where did that figure come from and how were they able to isolate the damage specifically caused by climate change, as opposed to, say, weather variations with climate change factored out?” So I decided to do some more digging.

Both articles seemed to suggest that, thanks to climate change, weather-related damage is on the rise in the US and the increased cost of this damage is due mostly to changes in the weather and not to factors unrelated to the weather, such as trends in population density or the value of assets in climate-vulnerable areas. Is this actually the case?

First, is weather wreaking increasing havoc in the US? If we used the cost of weather-related damage as a proxy for “havoc”, the answer would seem to be yes. This per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)*:

Next: Is the rising cost of weather-related disaster events in the US due to trends in extreme weather?

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* I suspect the $500 billion claim was based on NOAA data, but, again, neither article provided an attribution.

Reference:

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (2021). https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/, DOI: 10.25921/stkw-7w73