 Since 1980, hurricanes, severe storms, floods, and wildfires from billion-dollar events have cost the nation more than $2.5 trillion in damage and taken 16,000 lives. Credit: NASA Whether we wake up or not, a harsh climate is the new normal. To date in 2023, the United States has already suffered nine climate and weather disasters resulting in at least a billion dollars of damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That fits with the last five years, which have seen an annual average of 18 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. That is a six-fold increase over the three such events a year during the 1980s, in adjusted dollars. Since 1980, hurricanes, severe storms, floods, and wildfires from billion-dollar events have cost the nation more than $2.5 trillion in damage and taken 16,000 lives. A quarter of the damages have come in just the last five years, causing major home insurers to astronomically raise rates in states seeing frequent severe weather and climate events, such as California, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Colorado. Allstate and State Farm have announced they will not issue any new homeowner policies in California. This of course is not the entire picture as there are countless storms under $1 billion that still ravage communities and drain state budgets. “It is important to keep in mind that these estimates do not reflect the total cost of U.S. weather and climate disasters, only those associated with events more than $1 billion in damages,” NOAA says. “That means they are a conservative estimate of how much extreme weather costs the United States each year.” According to one major global property database, nearly 15 million homes, or nearly 1 of every 10, was impacted in 2021 by natural disasters that are worsening with global warming, to the tune of $57 billion in property damage. Those costs are not yet steep enough. Part of that is that humans in the U.S. are normalizing the new normal, simply adapting to a seemingly incremental warmer environment rather than leap to action against an existential threat. A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that temperatures initially considered remarkable are unremarkable about five years later. The normalization effect is so strong that the study concluded: “It may be unlikely that rising temperatures alone will be sufficient to produce widespread support for mitigation policies.” The study’s lead author, Frances Moore of the University of California Davis, said in a press release, “We saw that extreme temperatures still make people miserable, but they stop talking about it. This is a true boiling-frog effect (referring to the false myth that a frog will not feel gradually warming temperatures until it boils to death). People seem to be getting used to changes they’d prefer to avoid. But just because they’re not talking about it doesn’t mean it’s not making them worse off.”
Disinformation dulls urgency
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