Dahr Jamail on the weather disasters to come

Costs of 2017 US Weather Disasters Demolish Previous Record

By Dahr Jamail,

Truth-Out,

12 January, 2018

2017 saw the US scorched by record-breaking wildfires in California, record-breaking rainfall events like Hurricane Harvey in Houston (just one of the three most expensive hurricanes to ever hit the US, which all occurred in 2017), damaging hail events, tornadoes, and extreme droughts that wiped out crops.

These extreme weather events, most of which were fueled at least in part by anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD), cost the US nearly a third of a trillion dollars ($306 billion) over the past year.

That is more money than the US government spent on transportation, housing and community, international affairs, energy and the environment, and science, combined, in 2015.

The total cost of these extreme weather events was, by nearly $100 billion, a US record.

More Disasters to Come

"While we have to be careful about kneejerk cause-effect discussions, the National Academy of Science and recent peer-reviewed literature continue to show that some of today's extremes have climate change fingerprints on them," University of Georgia meteorology professor J. Marshall Shepherd, a past president of the American Meteorological Society, told The Guardian.

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