A Billion Dollars a Day, Every Day

360 billion dollars a year or roughly a billion a day, every day. That's what the United States can/should expect in losses from climate change, according to a new report.

That sounds like a lot, something you expect to hear from an "alarmist" type, until you consider that the tab for the barrage of recent hurricanes that hammered the US - Harvey, Irma and Maria -  is expected to come in upwards of 300 billion, more than double all the hurricane losses the US has experienced over the previous decade. That's serious dinero.

The report tries to make the economic case for the Trump regime to act now to slash greenhouse gas emissions, essentially driving the transition to clean alternative energy in order to, wait for it, save money.

As reported by Reuters:

"Wednesday's study has been in the works for months, said co-author James McCarthy, professor of Oceanography at Harvard University. He said there was widening evidence that a shift from fossil fuels made economic sense.

'Why is Iowa, why is Oklahoma, why is Kansas, why is Texas investing in wind energy? Not because they are interested in sea level rise or ocean temperatures, but because it's economically sensible,' he told Reuters."

Inside Climate News looks at what this is costing individual states, especially in Trumpland where them folks just know that climate change is a hoax.

As was clear this year, the impacts of extreme weather aren't evenly spread across the states. In the last decade, Texas has had 32 storms with economic losses exceeding $1 billion—four times more than it saw during the decade of the 1990s. Oklahoma and Illinois have each had 23, a four-fold increase for Oklahoma and a six-fold increase for Illinois.

In the last decade, Louisiana has been hit by four hurricanes that passed the $1 billion threshold for damages and four floods resulting from hurricanes or severe storms with costs at least as high. In one of those events, 30 inches of rain fell in southern Louisiana over a few days in August 2016, damaging or destroying more than 50,000 homes, 100,000 vehicles and 20,000 businesses, according to the report. The price tag reached $10 billion, and 75 percent of the people affected were uninsured.

"The fiscal costs of hurricanes are higher than we think," said Tatyana Deryugina, a professor of finance at University of Illinois who was not involved in the study. "Most of the time when people think about how much a hurricane costs, they think about disaster aid. But public medical spending and unemployment insurance spending go up, too."

There are still going to be Trump supporters and other knuckle-draggers, especially in the halls of Congress, who will insist that you cannot tie Harvey, Irma and Maria to climate change. That's crap. As Vox reports, the fingerprints of climate change are all over the devastation and they're inescapable, undeniable. 

As Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria plowed through unusually warm oceans this summer, each one broke records, startling even the scientists who study extreme weather.

“All of these storms went through a period where they gained strength quickly,” said James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction. “That was alarming.”

The intensity of Hurricane Maria, which made landfall on Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm on September 20, was part of why it was so devastating to the island and its weak infrastructure, leaving Puerto Ricans in a humanitarian crisis.

But this year’s intense Atlantic storm season had another element tying its biggest events together: a monstrous, and sometimes deadly, amount of rain.

Images of the flooded metropolises of Houston, Jacksonville, and San Juan with overtopped dams, billowing sewage, and flooded homes show that torrential rain can be one of the most devastating consequences of hurricanes, especially in urban areas where concrete makes it harder for water to drain and where people can drown.

Scientists say the extreme rainfall events that feed these floods are on the rise for many parts of the world, and this year’s hurricanes fit that trend. In particular, rising temperatures in the ocean and the air alongside booming construction in vulnerable areas are fueling the increased risk from massive deluges.

That's right Gullibillies, climate change is warming the oceans. That means more evaporation, more water vapour and heat energy in the atmosphere, the ideal conditions for massive hurricanes of increasing frequency, duration and intensity.  It's just math and a very little bit of physics, that's all it is. 

It's not only the southern US that's taking a pounding. Britain's Met Office is predicting a stormy autumn season with seven major storms (winds up to 90 mph) by Christmas. That includes heavy rains from the remnants of hurricane Maria this weekend.  The good news - most of Britain can expect a white Christmas.