Whether we wake up or not, a harsh climate is the new
normal. To date in 2023, the United States has already
suffered nine climate and weather disasters resulting
in at least a billion dollars of damage, according to
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That fits with the last five years, which have seen an
annual average of 18 billion-dollar weather and climate
disasters. That is a six-fold increase over the three
such events a year during the 1980s, in adjusted
dollars. Since 1980, hurricanes, severe storms, floods,
and wildfires from billion-dollar events have cost the
nation more than $2.5 trillion in damage and taken
16,000 lives. A quarter of the damages have come in
just the last five years, causing major home insurers
to astronomically raise rates in states seeing frequent
severe weather and climate events, such as California,
Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Colorado.
Allstate and State Farm have announced they will not
issue any new homeowner policies in California.
This of course is not the entire picture as there are
countless storms under $1 billion that still ravage
communities and drain state budgets. “It is important
to keep in mind that these estimates do not reflect the
total cost of U.S. weather and climate disasters, only
those associated with events more than $1 billion in
damages,” NOAA says. “That means they are a
conservative estimate of how much extreme weather costs
the United States each year.”
According to one major global property database, nearly
15 million homes, or nearly 1 of every 10, was impacted
in 2021 by natural disasters that are worsening with
global warming, to the tune of $57 billion in property
damage. Those costs are not yet steep enough. Part of
that is that humans in the U.S. are normalizing the new
normal, simply adapting to a seemingly incremental
warmer environment rather than leap to action against
an existential threat.
A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences found that temperatures initially
considered remarkable are unremarkable about five years
later. The normalization effect is so strong that the
study concluded: “It may be unlikely that rising
temperatures alone will be sufficient to produce
widespread support for mitigation policies.”
The study’s lead author, Frances Moore of the
University of California Davis, said in a press
release, “We saw that extreme temperatures still make
people miserable, but they stop talking about it. This
is a true boiling-frog effect (referring to the false
myth that a frog will not feel gradually warming
temperatures until it boils to death). People seem to
be getting used to changes they’d prefer to avoid. But
just because they’re not talking about it doesn’t mean
it’s not making them worse off.”
Disinformation dulls urgency
Climate change denial and skepticism is a key feature
of the deep political divide in this nation, fueled by
long-running and coordinated campaigns of
disinformation, often funded by fossil fuel interests.
Most recently, as many cities broke pollution records
and New York City momentarily recorded the worst air
quality in the world from the plumes of smoke flowing
down from Canadian wildfires, climate and pollution
deniers blew their own smoke at the public on right-
wing media.
The infamous fossil fuel and tobacco industry shill
Steve Milloy falsely claimed on FOX News—which itself
glorifies oil and gas and lambasts environmental
regulations—that the wildfire smoke posed “no health
risk.” Not-a-scientist Milloy further pontificated,
“This doesn’t kill anybody. This doesn’t make anybody
cough. This is not a health event. This has got nothing
to do with climate . . .This is not because of fossil
fuels.”
Laughing FOX host Laura Ingraham then gave Milloy the
floor to deny the science of particulate matter to her
audience, which averages 2 million viewers. Milloy
promptly said that concern about particulates was
“crazy” and “invented” by the EPA. He said particulate
matter is so “innocuous,” that any attempt to claim
otherwise is “total junk science.”
A world of actual scientists can junk that lie. Fine
particulate pollution, known as PM 2.5, kills between
4.2 million and 5.7 million people a year, according to
a range of studies. More life years are lost around the
globe from PM 2.5, according to the Energy Policy
Institute at the University of Chicago, than from
cigarette smoking or alcohol.
In the U.S., exposure to PM 2.5 prematurely kills at
least 100,000 people a year. That is more than gun
deaths and fatal car crashes combined. This is before
considering a world with more wildfire smoke. Emergency
room visits for asthma doubled in New York during the
June plume, with most of the afflicted coming from
Black, Latino, and high-poverty neighborhoods.
A 2021 study in Lancet Planetary Health found that
worldwide, 33,500 people a year die from cardiovascular
and respiratory complications due to the fine
particulate matter of acute wildfire smoke. The study
said its findings were so “robust” that policy makers
should “manage vegetation and mitigate climate change
as far as possible.”
The findings are an urgent warning as NOAA says climate
change is “supercharging” drought conditions,
lengthening wildfire seasons. A new study in PNAS found
that the area of California’s summer wildfires has
grown fivefold over the last half century and could
increase by another 50 percent by 2050. Nearly all the
increase is due to global warming that is generally
drying out the state. Additionally, fires that engulf
communities carry even more risk in the smoke. Smoke
from California’s 2018 Camp Fire contained high levels
of lead and metals from burning buildings.
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