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. 

Heat Has Already Endangered More Than 1.5 Billion People This Year, Says Washington Post

Even before the start of June, heat endangered at least
1.5 billion people around the world, according to
a Washington Post analysis.

 It's barely into summer, not even astronomical summer quite yet, and the heat waves are building across the Northern Hemisphere. 

The year globally has been at a record hot pace this year. Often that heat is dangerous. 

An analysis by the Washington Post has concluded that 1.5 billion people around the world have already experienced heat that is potentially life-threatening. 

And this was as of the end of May. I doesn't include the heat now enveloping much of the United States, southeastern Canada and parts of Europe 

The baseline is what the National Weather Service has as a threshold for dangerous temperatures. They define it as a heat index of at least 103 degrees. 

Notice we're talking about heat index and not actual temperatures. If it's humid the heat index can be 103 degrees or more even if actual temperatures are only in the 90s. 

A healthy person exposed to such a heat index will probably end up with heat cramps and heat exhaustion. Prolonged exposure can cause heat stroke, which is a life-threatening condition.  

The Washington Post analysis  looked at 14,000 cities around the world to determine how many people were affected by this dangerous heat. It didn't include smaller towns and rural villages, so the 1.5 billion people is almost definitely an undercount. 

This is just a guess, but I imagine another billion people or more will wilt as the 103 degree heat danger threshold spreads to new areas through the summer.  

It has always gotten dangerously hot in some highly populated cities like Bangkok, Thailand and Mumbai, India. ]

However, as WaPo's Harry Stevens writes:  

"As global warming had nudged temperatures higher, days with dangerous heat have grown more common. Bangkok's 76 days of dangerous heat are a record for this point in the year (remember, as of  May 31), according to meteorological data beginning in 1979.

Other cities follow a similar pattern. Lagos, Nigeria, for instance, has faced 13 times as many dangerous heat days this year than average,"

 The heat in April and especially May struck a wide range of places. Southern Asia. Huge swaths of Africa. Central America. Mexico. Texas. Florida.   

So many more places will see dangerous heat - in some places repeatedly - before the cool breezes of autumn finally arrive in the Northern Hemisphere. 

We always say that the heat is most dangerous to the elderly and infirm, and that's certainly true. But everybody is at risk when the heat index gets ridiculous.   But as the Washington Post reports: 

"Even able-bodied people can fall victim to extreme heat. 'People typically are not aware that they're getting into trouble with the heat until they're really getting into trouble with the heat," said Kristie Ebi, an epidemiologist at the Center for Health and Global Environment at the University of Washington. 'You see people out doing activities when it's quite warm and suddenly, somebody collapses."

The grim part of this rising risk of deadly heat in the age of climate change is that it's all a sort of fossil fossil fuel-driven eugenics. Or at least Darwinism. 

WaPo 's Harry Stevens again:

"There is, however, a morbid silver lining to heat waves' lengthening duration. When a heat wave hits, mortality starts to rise after about 24 hours, as people unable to cool themselves down at night begin to perish, Ebi told me. 

But after a certain point, the death rate drops. Those most susceptible to heat's ravages have already passes away, leaving behind a population more fortified against the danger.

'A healthy adult can handle more days. It may not be pleasant, but, frankly, people have done this for millennia , Ebi said. 'It's the people who are more susceptible le to heat who we need to think about. And as the population is aging and taking more prescription medications, the pool of people who are susceptible is much larger.'"

There's a societal danger in all this. In some cultures, the elderly are revered. But - at least in my opinion - that reverence is fading, if it ever existed in some places, anyway. 

I really hope there's not a crowd out there who hopes climate driven heat "culls the herd."  The world can be a cruel place though. He just gotta keep hoping better minds and bigger hearts win the battle. 

 

 

Should Vermont Prepare For An Influx Of Climate Refugees?

Aerial view of Interstate 89, Exit 12, Taft Corners, Williston,
Vermont as it looked in 1975. The area is now essentially a 
mini-city. Williston and the rest of Vermont might see
more rapid population growth soon due to 
"climate refugees" fleeing vulnerable parts of the U.S 

We're seeing one mega-disaster weather after another, almost all of which were worsened by climate change.  

Will this trigger a new great migration of people fleeing vulnerable areas?  

And if that happens, will Vermont be part of the receiving end of this big migration?

Experts are warning that residents of western and southern states, faced with extreme drought, wildfires, water shortages, big storms, hurricanes and sea level rise, will soon start to swarm toward "safer" places in the United States.

One projection by Matthew Hauer, an assistant professor of sociology at Florida State University suggests 13.1 million Americans will relocate because of sea level rise along by 2100, based on projections that seas along the U.S. coast will rise by nearly six feet by then.  

Where will all these people go?  Apparently, mostly north and east.  To the Midwest and the interior Northeast. Vermont is looking like one of the more desirable landing spots for these migrants. There's lots of reasons why. 

Vermont is one place where we don't need to worry about sea level rise. At least not directly.  The Green Mountain State is regarded a "safe" place from climate change.  Sure, we're affected by global warming in the form of worse flooding, periodic droughts, stronger, weirder storms, hotter summers and iffier winters. 

But we tend to avoid the worst of it all. The summer heat waves aren't all that bad, compared to other areas of the nation. We don't often experience hurricanes.  Big wildfires are exceedingly rare. Droughts tend not to be as punishing as in the South and West. 

Vermont is such a Goldilocks state for climate change avoidance that a detailed study by ProPublic and New York Times in 2021 listed the "safest "counties in the United States in terms of threats from climate change. Six of the top ten safest counties were in Vermont. 

I still don't know whether that's true, but it does make sound Vermont enticing, doesn't it? Certainly, most of the 13.1 million sea level/climate refugees won't come to Vermont. But some of them might.  A small percentage of those refugees would certainly swell our population far beyond the current 625,000 or so. 

It's easier than ever to pull up roots and move. Most people need a job, and we don't have millions of employment opportunities here in Vermont. However, the pandemic demonstrated that it's often surprisingly easy to work from home, or from anywhere as long as you have a decent internet connection.    Want to live in Vermont but your job is in California? No problem! You can do both! 

On one hand, this is good.  We have an aging population in the Green Mountain State, and we need relatively young, educated people here to boost our work force and our economy. We even have an incentive program that pays younger working families to move to Vermont to start new careers and lives. 

However, plenty of roadblocks get in the way of a potential booming population.  There's virtually no affordable housing around here. Or infrastructure, really. Plus, our population has been relatively stable for a century now. Vermont's population is less than double of that of 1900. Other states have grown exponentially.

We're accustomed to slow growth.  What if our population begins to grow rapidly?

We cherish our rural atmosphere. Our little farms, undeveloped forests, our lack of crowds.  We like our small and quirky state.  Will we adjust to many more arrivals if forced to? 

There's already resistance. Vermonters understandably cling to the small scale patterns of towns, populations, roads, you name it. We're not enamored by high rise buildings, super freeways, or endless sprawls of apartment blocks, "honky tonks, Dairy Queens and 7-11's," to quote an old Talking Heads song.  

Sprawl has long been a dirty word in Vermont. If we do receive an influx of climate change refugees, we will have to build more densely in existing town centers, and build upward. Meaning something akin to high rises. 

I can't imagine (at least not yet!) a Vermont with 30, 40, or 50 story towers.  Currently, the tallest building in Vermont is Decker Towers in Burlington, at a mere 11 floors, or 124 feet tall. Vermont has the distinction of having the shortest tallest building in the United States, if that makes any sense. 

By the looks of things, Vermont is going to have a hard time building anything remotely as tall as Decker Towers. Here's just one example, courtesy of VTDigger:

Busy Taft Corners in Williston is going through another rezoning effort.

Part of the change involves building heights. Currently, the tallest building you can construct there is 52 feet - about four stories.  Town officials wanted to raise the Taft Corners building height limit to 110 feet. That's about eight stories, so not gigantic. 

The town selectboard got so much blowback from that idea that they lowered the proposed height limit to 87 feet, or about six stories. That's still way too high for many people in Williston.  VTDigger quoted one resident:  "I just don't want to see a tall building in the middle of Williston, period. You know, it's a small town. It is a town. It's not a city."

Like it or not, the Taft Corners area of Williston has become a defacto small city.  This isn't the only building height fight we've had recently. Burlington saw huge opposition back in 2015 to a proposal to build two 14-story towers in the city's downtown.

It's either taller buildings or much more intense sprawl in Vermont if people flee to the relative safety of the Green Mountain State. One way or another, we'll have to choose. 

Vermont is already losing about 14,500 acres per year to residential development. (All of last summer, I heard the hammers and equipment for new houses going up in a formerly forested area less than a mile from my St. Albans house).

Building heights and sprawl are just two issues among many.  We'd have to think about things large and small. School size and budgets, taxes, affordable housing, infrastructure, broadband, land use, job creation,  cultural shifts. It goes on and on. 

Societal issues arise, too. Things that are really hard to talk about, but need to be confronted. Vermont is among the whitest states in the nation. We have a reputation for tolerance, but we have our share of racist, homophobes, Christian nationalists and other creepy people living here. 

A fair number of climate refugees that eventually arrive here will be Black, or of Hispanic, Asian or Arabic descent. How well will Vermont do as its racial diversity changes? I can only hope the resurgence of racism and xenophobia in the United States doesn't intensify further nationally and here in Vermont.   

We have slightly less but still real conflict points too.  Many Vermonters still dismissively refer to newcomers as "flatlanders" who supposedly don't fit in or bring their "problematic" ways of life to the Green Mountain State. 

It'll probably be best to welcome climate refugees if we get them, since it's starting to look almost inevitable. Other locations are largely supporting what is already starting to be an influx. 

In April, Tulane University associate professor of real estate Jesse Keenan provided CNBC a list of American cities that would be great "climate havens." In addition to Burlington, Vermont, Keenan listed cities like Buffalo and Rochester, New York, Asheville, North Carolina, Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Duluth, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Detroit, Michigan. 

Several of these are rust belt cities that fell on hard times during the later half of the 20th century. This might, for these communities, a bit of a resurgence and recovery. 

Buffalo, New York is already promoting itself as a climate refuge city. This city of screaming, blinding lake effect blizzards is actually regarded as among the safest from weather and climate disasters. 

Wildfires and hurricanes tend not to hit Buffalo. Heat waves are actually the leading cause of weather-related fatalities. Buffalo does get heat waves, but less so than many areas of the nation. Plus, Lake Erie tends to temper the worst of the heat waves. Bonus: Lake Erie has plenty of fresh water, so droughts are not that big a problem.

Also, there's room in Buffalo for an influx of people. As Fast Company notes, Buffalo's population was around a half million in the 1950s and is now about half that. 

Buffalo is also boosting affordable housing and bolstering its infrastructure for a climate refugee wave that has already started.    Roughly 3,000 Puerto Ricans moved to the Buffalo metro area to start new lives after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island. 

Fast Company does raise a risk that climate refugees can create in Buffalo, and anywhere else, including Vermont: Climate gentrification. Says the Fast Company article:

"'Think about the first people who are going to start migrating because of climate,' says Ryan McPherson, chief sustainability officer at the University of Buffalo. 'Those are not going to be poor people, right? Those are going to be people with resources. And so, we have to make sure that as we think about planning and making Buffalo ready for climate migration that we do that in a way that is very equitable and fair."

Wealth inequity is another important factor that we'll need to consider.  We already have an extreme dearth of affordable housing. Plus, people with wealth tend to get their way, at least more than people of more modest means. The more well-heeled could potentially crowd out people of more modest means.

Sure, we'll need to welcome climate refugees when the time comes, but we 'll need the backbone and morals to take Buffalo's pledge: Make it fair to everybody, not just the folks with lots of cash lying around.  We can't just let the wealthy drop in and snap up all the housing and land. There's got to be some fairness involved. 

Vermont is already starting to see the first few climate refugees. For instance, at least three families fled Paradise, California after the town was destroyed by a 2018 wildfire and ended up in the Green Mountain State. 

For instance the Boston Globe profiled the Holden family, who lost everything to the Paradise fire, and subsequently moved to "safer" Proctor, Vermont to start a new life.  They did a lot of research, including watching YouTube videos of the horrible 2011 tropical storm Irene flooding.  They were relieved that the Proctor/Rutland area, while damaged by the flood, was mostly intact after the disaster, unlike Paradise, California.  

And the house they purchased did not suffer any flood damage from Irene. 

The current small influx of people is manageable, and judging from the Globe article, the Holdens seem to be settling in just fine in Proctor. 

However climate change and its effects on human behavior often hit in sudden and surprising ways. Good, smart people in Vermont  are beginning to at least think about how to deal with this potential influx of people.

As WCAX-TV reported last year, we need to do a lot more to prepare for this possible influx: 

"UVM Professor of Community Development and Applied Economics Chris Koliba says from a social and economic standpoint, Vermont probably isn't ready to take in more people."

Koliba's remarks to WCAX in December, 2021 are not doubt just as true now. 

Note that we had a bit of an influx of people during the early months of the Covid pandemic, and that made the state's housing shortage worse, and strained schools and infrastructure to at least some extent.

The potential influx of climate refugees to Vermont does not at all have to be a bad thing. As Seven Days reported in January, these newcomers can inject the state's economy with new jobs and commerce, rescue flagging local schools and expand Vermont's tax base. 

As Seven Days notes, as long as we plan soberly, and welcome people of all income types, especially the squeezed middle class, and keep our rural character, we can reap the economic benefits. This could easily be a win for Vermont. Which sounds harsh, since climate change is such a loss.  " 

As for me, I'm absolutely for welcoming people to Vermont.  But we have to do it right and well. There won't be any do-overs. 

 

Latest UN Climate Report An Exercise In Justified Worry

People are just beginning to digest the latest big fat report from UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released Monday, but the initial news reports on it paint a grim picture. 

Latest UN report on climate change, released this
past week, has a gloomy outlook. 

I mean, check out the lead paragraph of the Associated Press summary article on this thing:

"Deadly with extreme weather now, climate change is about to get so much worse. It is likely going to make the world sicker, hungrier, poorer, gloomier and way more dangerous in the next 18 years with an 'unavoidable' increase in risks, a new United Nations science report says."

The AP article goes on:

'"The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health,' says the major report designed to guide world leaders in their efforts to curb climate change. Delaying cuts in heat-trapping carbon emissions and waiting on adapting to warming's impacts, it warns, 'will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.'"

Among the unhappy nuggets in the report:

Today's children who are still around in 2100 will see four times more climate extremes than they do today, even if the world's temperature goes up by another few tenths of a degree.  If temperatures go up by a little more then 3 degrees Fahrenheit by then, they would feel five times the number of disasters like floods, storms, heat waves and droughts. 

The report says that 3.3 billion people are already highly vulnerable to climate change and 15 times more likely to die in extreme weather. Large numbers of people are already being displaced by climate change. 

By 2050 - less than 30 years from now, about a billion people will face coastal flooding problems form rising seas, and many will be forced out of their homes from flooding, tropical cyclones and sea level rise. 

Some places could become uninhabitable, and others will become too hot for people to work outdoors. That's a problem if you're trying to grow crops, the AP notes. 

It's not just us humans that are having and will have a tough time with climate change. 

Vox outlines some major issues different species face with just a little more warming  

The IPCC says that 14 percent of all plants and animals on land would face a high risk of extinction.  If there's three degrees of warming, up to 29 percent of species on land could go extinct. 

Local populations of species are already decimated by climate change, even if the entire species isn't gone yet. 

Individual climate-related events can wipe out entire swaths, even majorities of some species. A subspecies of marsupial was essentially erased in a 2005 Australian heat wave. The enormous wildfires in the same nation decimated iconic Australian koala bears. 

The Pacific Northwest heat wave last June killed millions of ocean, lake and river aquatic animals. Just a little more warming could eliminate 90 percent of the world's already suffering coral reefs. 

The bottom line is the news in the latest report is bad, perhaps worse than most people would have believed.  As the New York Times reported:

"'One of the most striking conclusions in our report is that we're seeing adverse impacts that are much more widespread and much more negative than expected,' said Camille Parmesan, an ecologist at the University of Texas, Austin and one of the researchers who prepared the report."

 A lot of discussion regarding climate change is how we adapt to it. But the report indicates we need to step up the rate of adaptation. And if nothing is done to sharply reduce greenhouse emissions, things will have gone too far for any of us to adapt. 

The New York Times goes on: 

"'There has been the assumption that, 'Well, if we cannot control climate change, we'll just let it go and adapt to it,' said Hans-Otto Portner, a marine biologist in Germany who helped coordinate the report. But given the expected risks as the planet keeps warming, he said, 'this is certainly a very illusionary approach.'"

Here's the problem as I see it:  I know that most governments can walk and chew gum at the same time. But issues other than climate change facing the world are incredibly complex. The pandemic isn't over.  We have what really amounts to a global crisis with Russia's monstrous invasion of Ukraine. 

Sure, the fact that we're close to the point where climate change will limit humanity's ability to feed itself, climate change is the ultimate crisis. But you can't just blow off the other crises. 

Even if nations commit to aggressively combating climate change, which is a big if, do we have the bandwidth to actually get the job done? And done on time?

The IPCC estimates we'd have to eliminate almost all carbon emissions by 2050 to get a handle on things. That's only 28 years from now. Meanwhile, judging from the new record high for the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere set last year, emissions continue to rise. 

It's not like the IPCC hasn't been giving us a head's up on all this for the past couple of decades at least. 

The AP again here:

"The panel of more than 200 scientists puts out a series of these massive reports every five to seven years, with this one, the second of the series, devoted to how climate change affects people and the planet. Last August the science panel published a report on the latest climate science and projections for future warming, branded 'code red' by the United Nations."

The AP quoted climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of the Nature Conservancy as calling this latest report as the "Your House is on Fire" report. 

However, she and others still advocated hope.  The AP article again: "It's really bad and there's a good chance that it will get worse,' Hayhoe said. 'But if we do everything we can, that will make a difference....That's what hope is."

"'Fear is not a good advisor and never is,' German vice chancellor and minister for climate and economy told the AP. 'Hope is the right one.'"