Did Climate Change Create U.S, Global Warming U.S. Refugees In 2022?

People evacuating in Florida ahead of Hurricane Irma
in 2017.  In 2022, 3.3 million Americans had to
evacuate their homes, at least for a little while, 
due to extreme weather. 

Natural disasters forced 3.4 million Americans from their homes in 2022, according to a report from NBC News. 

Says the network: 

"Natural disasters forced an estimated 3.4 million people in the U.S. to leave their homes in 2022, according to Census Bureau data collected earlier this year, underscoring how climate-related weather events are already changing American communities. 

The overwhelming majority of these people were uprooted by hurricanes, followed by floods, then fires and tornadoes. Nearly 40 percent returned to their homes within a week. Nearly 16 percent have not returned home (and may never do so) and 12 percent were evacuated for more than six months."

 Some experts find the numbers from 2022 rather shocking, as NBC reports: 

"'These numbers are very distressing,' said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change law at Columbia University, who was not involved in the data collection. 'The numbers are what one would expect to find in a developing country. It's appalling to see them in the United States.. They're only going to get worse in the years to come because climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent and more severe.'"

I have to be careful here, though. It's not like the people who  had to leave their homes due to storms are all climate refugees.

Displacement created by climate-boosted disasters is definitely a thing. And it will get worse as the years go by and climate change intensifies.

As tragic as these 2022 disasters were, it would be wrong to call all the 3.4 million people displaced by severe weather climate refugees. Any time somebody is forced out of their homes by a storm, floods or some other disaster, that's unequivocally bad.  

It's fortunate that 40 percent of the people displaced were able to go home within a week. 

But still, we've always had hurricanes, floods tornadoes and fires that displaced people for months.  years or forever. At least some of the displacement highlighted here is due to climate change. But some of it is just dumb, bad luck. 

Also some homes are built in disaster prone areas. I'm not blaming the victim here, as many people are forced by poverty or other circumstances to live in places that can be dangerous.  Racial issues also, as seemingly always, come up. 

The U.S. Census data backs this up. Says NBC:

"Those earning less than $25,000 a year had the highest evacuation rate of any economic group, and Black and Hispanic residents had slightly higher evacuation rates than white residents."  

I don't have complete information on how the number of disaster refugees compare to previous years, but other organizations besides the U.S. Census have estimates.

As NBC News reports, the 1.4 percent of the U.S. adult population that the Census Bureau says were displaced by weather/climate disasters is higher than other estimates Says NBC:

"Data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, part of the humanitarian organization The Norwegian Refugee Council, previously estimated that disasters displaced an average of 800,000 U.S. residents a year from 2008 through 2021."

Dishearteningly, it seems adults who identify as LGBTQ are disproportionately affected by nature disasters. Four percent of LGBTQ people reported having to leave their homes compared to 1.2 percent of straight people.   

In a state by state breakdown, it's no surprise that Florida came in #1 in terms of the number of people displaced in 2022 with just under a million people, North Dakota had the fewest, with 1,088.

Here in Vermont, 1,629 people were displaced at least temporarily from their homes due to storms. I'm guessing most of that is from the effects of power outages during storms.