Do you know someone--maybe your congressman--who’s wringing his hands about President Biden’s proposals to invest significant sums in clean energy, green infrastructure, and other climate-related initiatives?
If you do, refer him to the report that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has just issued on the cost of natural disasters last year. A record 22 weather and climate-related disasters caused damages of more than $1 billion apiece. Altogether, last year’s natural disasters in the United States accounted for $95 billion in damages (almost double the amount in 2019), killing 262 people and injuring many more, NOAA reported.
Compare the number of billion-dollars-in-damages natural disasters last year (22) to the annual average since 1980: seven. It sounds like strong federal action is in order.
Last year featured a record number of named Atlantic storms, as well as the largest wildfires ever recorded in California. Take a look at NOAA’s graphic summarizing the year’s disasters.
“Climate change plays a role in this upward trend of losses,” Ernst Rauch, the chief climate scientist at Munich Re, told Christopher Flavelle of The New York Times. Munich Re is one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies. The insurance industry is struggling to determine risk and to price its products as extreme weather exacts a growing toll on people and property.
The 30 named Atlantic storms caused $43 billion in losses, almost half the total for all U.S. disasters last year. Topping the list was Hurricane Laura, which caused $13 billion in damage when it struck Southwestern Louisiana in late August.
As Rauch explained in The Times’ story, the 2020 hurricane season was unusually devastating because climate change is making storms more likely to stall once they hit land, pumping more rain and wind into coastal towns and cities for longer periods of time.
The next costliest category of natural disasters in 2020 was convective storms, which generated $40 billion in losses. This category includes thunderstorms, derechos, tornadoes, and hailstorms. A derecho that struck Iowa and other Midwestern states in August caused almost $7 billion in damage, destroying huge amounts of corn and soybeans.
Wildfires caused another $16 billion in losses. Fires burned more than four million acres across California, doubling the record set in 2018. The August Complex Fire burned more than one million acres, by far the most in state history, Scientific American reported.
Last year’s fires stood out not just because of the numbers of acres burned or houses destroyed, Munich Re said, but also because so much of that damage was outside of California. For example, 4,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in Oregon. In Colorado, the Cameron Peak Fire was the largest in state history, burning more than 208,000 acres. The state’s second-largest in history, the Pine Gulch Fire, also occurred in 2020.
David Romps, director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, told James Temple of MIT Technology Review that we are living in a fundamentally climate-altered world. “To cut to the chase,” Romps said: “Were the heat wave and the lightning strikes and the dryness of the vegetation affected by global warming? Absolutely yes. Were they made significantly hotter, more numerous, and drier because of global warming? Yes, likely yes, and yes.”
Since 1980, when NOAA began tracking billion-dollar disasters, every state has had at least one. Texas leads the pack, with a stunning 124.
We can expect things to get even worse. The Biden administration and Congress need to take action immediately, and one of the steps they should take is to put an honest price on carbon emissions. Please urge your representatives on Capitol Hill to support such efforts.