Recap:
The inspiration for this series of posts 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
The author 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.” Rebecca Hersher, interviewed in “What Are The Costs Of Climate Change?”/ NPR September 16, 2020
Again, no elaboration, no link, no reference.
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 question: is the cost of weather-related damage going up in the US? Per data provided by the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, and looking only at the most expensive disasters, the answer would seem to be yes. For details, see How to Read Science News, Part I: The Cost of Climate Change (Initial Exploration).
Next question: Are the costs of weather-related damage going up because the weather in the US has gotten worse? For example:
Are hurricanes more powerful or frequent?
Are heatwaves longer or more intense?
Are droughts getting longer or more frequent?
Are high precipitation events wetter or more frequent?
The Our World in Data website has tons of data pertinent to these questions, summarized in a series of charts. First, trends in hurricane activity:
As for heatwaves….
And droughts…
How about high precipitation events?
There’s definitely an upward trend in extreme one-day precipitation events, if not in the amount of land subject to unusually high annual rainfall. Here’s another weather trend that appears to be on an upward trajectory:
Considering only the Our World in Data evidence, there does not appear to be an overall trend of increasingly extreme weather in the US. True, summers have been getting hotter since the mid-1960s and one-day extreme rainfall totals are trending higher, but I see no clear trends in heatwaves, drought severity, frequency of extreme rainfall, or hurricane activity.
Next: What factors other than weather might contribute to the rising cost of weather-related disaster events in the US?
Reference:
Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2014) - "Natural Disasters". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. First published in 2014 and last revised in November 2019. Retrieved on August 17, 2021 from: https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters