Billion Dollar Disasters: Climate Change Not The Only Culprit

Damage from October's Hurricane Milton in Florida.
Climate change might be making storms bigger and
more destructive, but perhaps a bigger reason for
these expensive disasters are because zillions
of people are moving into calamity-prone areas.

 We hear a lot about billion dollar climate disasters - especially this year, as fires, floods and a terrible hurricane season took their toll.  

These billion dollar disasters and climate change are often mentioned in the same breath.  Climate change causes more extreme storms, so it's natural that an increasing number of storms will end up being especially expensive, right?

Climate change might be an influence, but it's not necessarily the main one.  The trouble is, more and more people are getting in the way. People are moving to places that are at biggest risk for the biggest storms. 

Then building things. Lots of things. As the Washington Post put it: "Disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy."

WaPo continues:

"Yet the consensus among disaster researchers is that the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.

“A lot of the things we see in the disaster losses are obscured because there’s an overwhelming signal of more people in risky places, growing populations worldwide, more infrastructure, more assets, higher values,” said Bouwer, the five-time IPCC lead author. “This is the main signal. And that’s where the science is at the moment.”

A classic example is Florida. The total population of 15 counties hit by hurricane force winds during this October's Hurricane Milton had gone up from 3.7 million people in 1980 to 9.1 million in 2023. That's nearly triple. 

During the same period, economic activity in the 15 counties, measured through the inflation-adjusted wages earned by people there, quadrupled between 1980 and 2023.

It appears that societal trends - like humans getting in the way in locations prone to disaster - works in concert with climate change to make everything more expensive.  The economic damage from Hurricane Milton was because more people were in the path of the storm than ever before. And climate change, according to scientists. made Milton's winds stronger and more damaging. 

It's not just hurricanes of course.  Wildfires out west are almost always started by humans.  And wildfires have always occurred out there. 

Now, though, millions of people live in fire prone areas, and the population in those areas keeps growing. WaPo says that the number of housing units in the "woodland urban interface" - jargon for places in the woods or brush or right on the edge of these areas - grew from 30.1 million in 1990 to 44.1 million by 2020.

Hotter, drier conditions are simultaneously making those fires more dangerous and more likely to blast though these woodsy neighborhoods. 

 As of October, the number of weather disasters in the U.S. this year costing at least $1 billion is now up to 24. The only year that was worse was last year, when there were 27 such disasters through mid-October.

There's lots of talk about people moving to "climate havens," places that are not prone to this climate-driven mega disasters.  

There's two problems with that. There's decidedly no stampede of people moving to these so-called havens. It's more of a trickle.

Plus, we're learning that these "havens" aren't so haven-y.  Asheville, North Carolina and surrounding areas were supposedly a place where climate-driven disasters were less likely. So much for that idea after Hurricane Helene.

A 2021 study a few years ago famously said Vermont was another great climate refuge. Supposedly, Lamoille, Orange, Franklin and Essex counties in Vermont were the top four safest in the nation. 

Each of those counties has experienced repeated, destructive floods in recent years that required several federal disaster declaration.  

Even so, Asheville and Lamoille County, Vermont are probably safer from these disasters than say, the drowning coasts of Florida or the windy, dry canyons of California. Plus there are other spots regarded as great climate havens.

Like northern Minnesota, where it still gets down to 40 below  in the winter despite climate change. Or areas around Buffalo, New York and Erie, Pennsylvania, where jobs of relatively few and snow is often extremely plentiful. 

Perhaps rising insurance rates will slow the migration to hurricane-prone Florida or fire-prone California and similar states.  But that hasn't happened yet.  Even if it does, climate havens are probably not prepared for an influx of people, and not prepared for the worst effects of climate change. 

If you're looking for answers to this whole dilemma, don't look at me. If I had the answers, I'd definitely be in a far different tax bracket than I am now.