NOAA recently did a press release touting 11 (eleven) “Billion Dollar Disasters” so far this year, and some are already asking if the rains in Florida from invest AL90 will also cross the Billion dollar mark. Is this a trend? Is Climate Change responsible? I wonder what the “how about no” bear thinks …
I’ve already ranted about this, but given the media coverage and the great example South Florida provides it’s worth revisiting. The explosive growth in the region over the last few decades means events that were under $400 million in inflation adjusted impacts are now three times as much, over $1.2 Billion because a) there is more stuff in the way, and, b) the stuff is more expensive relative to inflation.
Click any image to embiggen.
It is no surprise to anyone who doesn’t light their cigars with $100 bills that inflation over the last 20 years has been pretty bad. The Consumer Price Index inflation factor from 2000 to 2023 is 180% – so something that cost $10,000 in 2000 now costs $18,000. But, in some sectors of the economy prices have gone up far more than that. What causes most losses/damage? Homes, buildings, and for floods, cars and other vehicles. The median home price has more than doubled since 2000 (up by a factor of 2.5, $168,800 vs $423,200), the average car transaction price is up about the same factor, more than doubling.
And that’s not even taking in to account population change and growth. Do that and it’s worse for some areas like Florida. For example, the value of exposure at risk in South Florida is gone up by a factor of 5.63 since 2000, not just 1.8. So a measly $200 million dollar event in 2000 would, using the CPI correction, be $360 million, but with all the population and exposure growth tops out at $1.226 Billion.
So, given it’s still raining, and looking at the LSR’s over the last 24 hours, there seems to be a lot of dramatic street flooding, probably some car damage and structural flooding, and normally I wouldn’t be too excited about it but it’s so easy to hit $1 billion in impacts these days I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t top out that high.
To be clear, our climate is changing, it is making some natural disasters worse, and we need to do something about it. However, by far we are our own worst enemy. While climate related impacts will no doubt continue to increase, as near as I can tell 90 or 95% of the trend in increasing damage is not due to climate change, but are due to increasing exposure, bad urban and regional planning, agricultural practices, and so forth. So even if you are a Luddite and don’t think climate change is a real thing, you should support better planning and mitigation because that’s where the problem is.
If you like this kind of in depth commentary, you can sign up for direct emails here (and contribute a bit to keep it going if you want to).
Curse You Enki! How dare you bring Reason to our Tarantala of Anxiety and Doom Scrolling! What if the children should look up from their screens and, dare I say it, ponder and consider?
So true, thanks for tackling a sore subject.
If there were no life on Earth, there still would be climate change. Arrogance and ignorance have combined to delude us into thinking we can change that. We can’t. What we can change are practices that make the results so much more dramatic.