A new report has shown that the United States was hit by 18 catastrophic extreme weather and climate disasters costing at least $1 billion each last year which came in the form of tornadoes, extreme heat and cold, deadly flooding and hurricanes and a climate change-fueled drought in the West.
When taken together, the country’s so-called billion-dollar disasters inflicted at least $165 billion in damage last year — surpassing 2021 disasters in cost — and caused at least 474 deaths, according to the report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Hurricane Ian, the Category 4 storm that left a trail of devastation across the Caribbean and Florida, carried the highest economic toll of nearly $113 billion, along with a death toll of 152, NOAA reported.
The second-costliest disaster was a blistering summer heat wave and the historic drought, which spread from the West to the Mississippi River, totaling about $22.2 billion in damages.
Over the last seven years, 122 separate billion-dollar disasters have killed at least 5,000 people and cost the US more than $1 trillion in damages, the agency said.
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At the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society this week, where NOAA officials will present their findings, scientists say the fingerprints of climate change are all over these extreme weather disasters.
“What we’ve learned over the past 20 years is that extreme events are the face of climate change,” Stephanie Herring, climate scientist at the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, told journalists on Monday.
People may not notice a small change in global average temperature, Herring said, but those changes “have huge impacts” on the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
Five of the last six years, except 2019, have seen disasters exceed the $100-billion mark, a signal that extreme weather events are becoming more costly and destructive as climate change accelerates.
“We’re talking big money here and it’s consistent,” Adam Smith, applied climatologist with NOAA who led the report, told CNN. “This is another trend where the cost and the impacts are quite large and so we need to think about how to better mitigate future damages because we know these extremes will continue to happen.”
