<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/10/extreme-weather-climate-crisis-us-deaths-financial-damage>
"The US endured a particularly painful year as communities wrestled with the
growing impacts of the climate crisis, with 18 major disasters wreaking havoc
across the country as planet-heating emissions continued to climb.
Storms, floods, wildfires and droughts caused a total of $165bn in damages in
the US last year, $10bn more than the 2021 total and the third most costly year
since records of major losses began in 1980, according to new US government
data.
With 18 disasters costing at least $1bn in damages, 2022 was only marginally
behind 2020 and 2021 in terms of the number of severe events. A total of 474
people died last year from these major calamities, the annual report found.
Last year was “part of a trend of hyperactive disaster years across the US”,
said Adam Smith, an applied climatologist at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), which released the data. Since 2016, there
have been 122 separate billion-dollar weather and climate events that have, in
total, killed more than 5,000 people and caused more than $1tn in damages.
“We are seeing several trends of climate-enhanced disasters,” said Smith,
noting that the US is seeing longer, more intense wildfire seasons, severe
rainfall events and the sort of huge, category four and five hurricanes in the
past few years that Noaa has not documented before in its historical record,
which stretches back to 1851."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
