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| The interior of a flood-destroyed liquor store in Johnson, Vermont on July 12, 2023. This was just one tiny piece of the 63 weather and climate disasters worldwide in 2023 that cost more than $1 billion in damage. |
Needless to say, these mega-disasters are increasingly a global phenomenon, and we have more receipts.
Jeff Masters over at Yale Climate Connections has the deets:
"The planet was besieged by a record 63 billion dollar weather disaster sin 2023, surpassing the previous record of 57 set in 2020, said insurance broker Gallagher Re in its annual report issued January 17. The total damage wrought by weather disasters in 2023 was $301 billion."
If you want a silver lining of sorts, that $300 billion in damage is a little less than the $360 billion in damage during 2022.
Different organizations have different ways of assessing disasters, so Gallagher Re's figures no doubt vary somewhat from other sources.
I was simultaneously surprised/not surprised to learn which disaster was the deadliest. It turns out it was heat waves in Europe during the summer of 2023. These heat waves killed an estimated 15,400 people.
The surprise I felt by that stat is the fact the big death toll was not really reported in the global media. But the part of me that wasn't surprised is that heat waves are the deadliest kind of weather disaster. Hot weather doesn't get the attention you see with dramatic hurricanes, floods and tornadoes. Let's face it, heat waves are not photogenic. So searing, record hot weather does not grab the attention of the media or the public.
If you want the worst death toll from a storm, that had to be the immense flash floods that hit Libya back in September. The official death toll from that disaster is over 4,300. But it's probably much higher since some reports tell us more than 8,000 people are still missing.
Seven nations - Mexico, Libya, Spain, Argentina, New Zealand, Greece and Uruguay - had their most expensive weather disasters on record during 2023,
Severe thunderstorm damage has been increasing at a fast pace of 9.6 percent per year since 2000. Most of that extra damage is because people keep moving into more suburban and formerly rural places. Hail causes the majority of the damage.
Like tornadoes, damaging hail usually causes its worse misery in long, narrow swaths. This suburban sprawl gives giant hail more targets to hit, so you get a lot of extra damage.
ROLE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Inflation and development contribute to the rise of more and more billion dollar disasters, said Gallagher Re. Climate change, however, is a big culprit, too.
Says the insurance broker:
"We continue to witness the ongoing influence of climate change on the behavior of individual events and broader weather patterns......The fingerprints are now regularly evident. If we do not meaningfully change the status quo and subsequently reverse the growth of carbon dioxide emissions then we should no longer be surprised at the consequences of more extreme weather/climate events that are influence by warmer ocean waters and a destabilized atmosphere."
Africa has seen a horrible uptick in weather and climate related disasters in recent years.
Nearly a quarter of Africa's 30 deadliest weather/climate disasters have occurred in just the past two years, Masters writes in Yale Climate Connection.
"This ominous figure could well be a harbinger of the future, as higher vulnerability, a growing population and more extreme weather events from climate change cause an increase in deadly disasters, even without accounting for the recurring episodes of catastrophic regional drought that can take tens of thousands of African lives in a single year."
All this is even more unfair than you'd think if you consider this: Except for Antarctica, Africa has likely contributed least to the atmosphere's increasing concentration of greenhouse gases that are driving this dangerous climate change.
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