Climate Change Is Getting Expensive
Climate change is getting expensive, and not addressing it has begun to cost us in significant ways.
Climate change denialists, including many of our own local elected representatives, continue to repeat their talking points about jobs and freedom and so forth, but the bill for climate negligence is coming due, not only at some point in the future but also right now. Thanks to the fires in Canada, in recent days you can smell that fact in the evening air.
Hurricanes, floods, droughts, wild fires and heat waves are all hard to ignore. Right now smoke from the more than 100 wild fires burning across Quebec and Nova Scotia in Canada is giving our sunsets in Central Pennsylvania a new look even as our local fire chiefs warn of “dry lightning” and a “red flag” risk of wild fires in our own corner of the world. As I write this on Wednesday, June 7, the air quality, according to the app on my phone, is “unhealthy for all groups” including, I suspect, most Republicans.
The reality of extreme weather events is evident to those who live through them. But to others they can sometimes seem a little bit unreal. One way to measure their impact, and document their reality, is by toting up their costs in dollar terms. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has been doing just that through its National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).
NCEI has been studying “billion dollar” extreme weather/climate disaster events over recent years and looking for trends. They’ve been careful (and transparent) about what is included as a “cost.” According to the NOAA website, these costs include physical damage to buildings and material assets within the buildings; lost physical assets such as vehicles and boats; damaged manmade infrastructure of all kinds; and agricultural losses including crops, livestock and commercial timber; and wildfire suppression costs. Not included, however, are losses of natural capital and environmental degradation, mental or physical healthcare costs, and “business interruption costs.” Nor is the value of human lives lost estimated in economic terms. “Therefore,” the website continues, “our estimates should be considered conservative with respect to what is truly lost.”
Even framed conservatively in this way extreme weather/climate disaster events are very expensive, and as the NOAA website makes clear the number of events costing more than a billion dollars has been growing rather dramatically in recent years. Since 1980 when the survey begins the US has experienced 355 extreme events costing more than a billion dollars each (in constant 2023 dollars) for a total of more than $2.540 trillion. Serious business for sure.
What is most striking, however, is the way the number of these events has increased over the years in association with rising temperatures. In the decade beginning in 1980, there were 33 such events. In the 1990s there were 57. During the first decade of the 21st century, there were 67. By the 2010s, that number had increased to 131.
The average per year from 1980-present, has been 8.1 events. During the last five years, however, the average increased to 18 per year. In the first months of 2023—January to May 8, we have already experienced “7 confirmed weather/climate disaster events costing more than a billion dollars” according to the NOAA website.
While it’s true that we have contributed to the problem by placing a lot of our housing and infrastructure in harm’s way whether in areas vulnerable to wild fires or too close to rising sea levels, it’s also pretty clear we have a trend here that we better pay attention to. The costs of not acting to address climate change and the global warming that comes with it have grown dramatically and most likely will continue to do so.
Will Lane teaches part time in the Environmental Studies Department at Gettysburg College, hosts the online Green Gettysburg Book Club and is a member of Gettysburg Democracy for America.