Climate Change Has Caused The U.S. Billions In Flood Damages

[bluewave]

https://news.stanford.edu/2021/01/11/climate-change-caused-one-third-historical-flood-damages/

In a new study, Stanford researchers report that intensifying precipitation contributed one-third of the financial costs of flooding in the United States over the past three decades, totaling almost $75 billion of the estimated $199 billion in flood damages from 1988 to 2017.

The research, published Jan. 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps to resolve a long-standing debate about the role of climate change in the rising costs of flooding and provides new insight into the financial costs of global warming overall.

“The fact that extreme precipitation has been increasing and will likely increase in the future is well known, but what effect that has had on financial damages has been uncertain,” said lead author Frances Davenport, a PhD student in Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “Our analysis allows us to isolate how much of those changes in precipitation translate to changes in the cost of flooding, both now and in the future.”

The global insurance company Munich Re calls flooding “the number-one natural peril in the U.S.”However, although flooding is one of the most common, widespread and costly natural hazards, whether climate change has contributed to the rising financial costs of flooding – and if so, how much – has been a topic of debate, including in the most recent climate change assessments from the U.S. government and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

At the crux of that debate is the question of whether or not the increasing trend in the cost of flooding in the U.S. has been driven primarily by socioeconomic factors like population growth, housing development and increasing property values. Most previous research has focused either on very detailed case studies (for example, of individual disasters or long-term changes in individual states) or on correlations between precipitation and flood damages for the U.S. overall.

In an effort to close this gap, the researchers started with higher resolution climate and socioeconomic data. They then applied advanced methods from economics to quantify the relationship between historical precipitation variations and historical flooding costs, along with methods from statistics and climate science to evaluate the impact of changes in precipitation on total flooding costs. Together, these analyses revealed that climate change has contributed substantially to the growing cost of flooding in the U.S., and that exceeding the levels of global warming agreed upon in the United Nations Paris Agreement is very likely to lead to greater intensification of the kinds of extreme precipitation events that have been most costly and devastating in recent decades.

“Previous studies have analyzed pieces of this puzzle, but this is the first study to combine rigorous economic analysis of the historical relationships between climate and flooding costs with really careful extreme event analyses in both historical observations and global climate models, across the whole United States,” said senior author and climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, the Kara J Foundation Professor at Stanford Earth.

“By bringing all those pieces together, this framework provides a novel quantification not only of how much historical changes in precipitation have contributed to the costs of flooding, but also how greenhouse gases influence the kinds of precipitation events that cause the most damaging flooding events,” Diffenbaugh added.

The researchers liken isolating the role of changing precipitation to other questions of cause and effect, such as determining how much an increase in minimum wage will affect local employment, or how many wins an individual player contributes to the overall success of a basketball team. In this case, the research team started by developing an economic model based on observed precipitation and monthly reports of flood damage, controlling for other factors that might affect flooding costs like increases in home values. They then calculated the change in extreme precipitation in each state over the study period. Finally, they used the model to calculate what the economic damages would have been if those changes in extreme precipitation had not occurred.

“This counterfactual analysis is similar to computing how many games the Los Angeles Lakers would have won, with and without the addition of LeBron James, holding all other players constant,” said study co-author and economist Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science.

Applying this framework, the research team found that – when totaled across all the individual states – changes in precipitation accounted for 36 percent of the actual flooding costs that occurred in the U.S. from 1988 to 2017. The effect of changing precipitation was primarily driven by increases in extreme precipitation, which have been responsible for the largest share of flooding costs historically.

“What we find is that, even in states where the long-term mean precipitation hasn’t changed, in most cases the wettest events have intensified, increasing the financial damages relative to what would have occurred without the changes in precipitation,” said Davenport, who received a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship in 2020.

The researchers emphasize that, by providing a new quantification of the scale of the financial costs of climate change, their findings have implications beyond flooding in the U.S.

“Accurately and comprehensively tallying the past and future costs of climate change is key to making good policy decisions,” said Burke. “This work shows that past climate change has already cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars, just due to flood damages alone.”

The authors envision their approach being applied to different natural hazards, to climate impacts in different sectors of the economy and to other regions of the globe to help understand the costs and benefits of climate adaptation and mitigation actions.

“That these results are as robust and definitive as they are really advances our understanding of the role of historical precipitation changes in the financial costs of flooding,” Diffenbaugh said. “But, more broadly, the framework that we developed provides an objective basis for estimating what it will cost to adapt to continued climate change and the economic value of avoiding higher levels of global warming in the future.”

[Vice-Regent]

Let the idiots pay for it. They tend to be concentrated on the coastlines at any rate.

[FPizz]

42 minutes ago, Vice-Regent said:

Let the idiots pay for it. They tend to be concentrated on the coastlines at any rate.

The amount of housing and development next to waterways over the past several decades is the factor and building in remaining open spaces elsewhere overall.  While an increased amount of precip may very well have happened, if we hadn't built 10 fold, I'm sure the billions number would have been drastically reduced.  Take NJ for example.  The coastline is loaded with homes 10 feet from an Ocean.  Then, the mandate for low income housing is causing communities to chop down their remaining land and put up more housing to reach an arbitrary % agreed to by the state gov.  My old town alone, if you look at the open space from 1990 vs now, it is almost non-existent.  It is all becoming concrete and the water has no place to go.

[bluewave]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190801120209.htm

US infrastructure unprepared for increasing frequency of extreme storms

 

August 1, 2019

 

American Geophysical Union
 

Current design standards for United States hydrologic infrastructure are unprepared for the increasing frequency and severity of extreme rainstorms, meaning structures like retention ponds and dams will face more frequent and severe flooding, according to a new study.

Extreme weather events are on the rise, but U.S. water management systems use outdated design guidelines. New research, published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, analyzed data from multiple regions throughout the U.S. and found the rising number of extreme storms combined with outdated building criteria could overwhelm hydrologic structures like stormwater systems.

The new study is particularly timely in light of recent storms and flash floods along the East Coast.

"The take-home message is that infrastructure in most parts of the country is no longer performing at the level that it's supposed to, because of the big changes that we've seen in extreme rainfall," said Daniel Wright, a hydrologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the new study.

Engineers often use statistical estimates called IDF curves to describe the intensity, duration, and frequency of rainfall in each area. The curves, published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are created using statistical methods that assume weather patterns remain static over time.

"Design engineers at cities, consulting companies, and counties use this for different purposes, like infrastructure design management, infrastructure risk assessment and so forth. It has a lot of engineering applications," said Amir Aghakouchak, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved with the new study.

But climate change is causing extreme rainfall events to occur more often in many regions of the world, something IDF curves don't take into account. One measure of extreme rainfall is the 100-year storm, a storm that has a one percent chance of happening in a given year, or a statistical likelihood of happening once in 100 years on average.

Wright and his colleagues wanted to know how existing IDF curves compare with recent changes in extreme rainfall. They analyzed records from more than 900 weather stations across the U.S. from 1950 to 2017 and recorded the number of times extreme storms, like 100-year storms, exceeded design standards. For example, in the eastern United States, extreme rainstorm events are happening 85 percent more often in 2017, than they did in 1950. In the western U.S., these storms are appearing 51 percent more often now than they once did.

The scientists found that in most of the country the growing number of extreme rainstorms can be linked to warming temperatures from climate change, although natural events, such as El Niño, also occasionally affect the Southeast's climate.

By comparing the number of storms that actually happened against the number predicted by IDF curves, the researchers also showed the potential consequences for U.S. infrastructure. In some regions, for example, infrastructure designed to withstand extreme rainstorms could face these storms every 40 years instead of every 100 years.

"Infrastructure that has been designed to these commonly-used standards is likely to be overwhelmed more often than it is supposed to be," Wright said.

The researchers hope the findings will encourage climate scientists, hydrologists, and engineers to collaborate and improve U.S. hydrologic infrastructure guidelines.

"We really need to get the word out about just how far behind our design standards are from there they should be," Wright said.

 

---

Story Source:

Materials provided by American Geophysical Union. Original written by Abigail Eisenstadt. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Daniel B. Wright, Christopher D. Bosma, Tania Lopez‐Cantu. U.S. Hydrologic Design Standards Insufficient Due to Large Increases in Frequency of Rainfall Extremes. Geophysical Research Letters, 2019; DOI: 10.1029/2019GL083235

 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/29/climate/hidden-flood-risk-maps.html

Nearly twice as many properties may be susceptible to flood damage than previously thought, according to a new effort to map the danger.

Across much of the United States, the flood risk is far greater than government estimates show, new calculations suggest, exposing millions of people to a hidden threat — and one that will only grow as climate change worsens.

That new calculation, which takes into account sea-level rise, rainfall and flooding along smaller creeks not mapped federally, estimates that 14.6 million properties are at risk from what experts call a 100-year flood, far more than the 8.7 million properties shown on federal government flood maps. A 100-year flood is one with a 1 percent chance of striking in any given year.

The federal government’s flood maps guide where and how to build, whether homeowners should buy flood insurance, and how much risk mortgage lenders take on. If the new estimates are broadly accurate, it would mean that homeowners, builders, banks, insurers and government officials nationwide have been making decisions with information that understates their true physical and financial risks.

Numerous cities nationwide — as diverse as Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Buffalo, N.Y., and Chattanooga, Tenn. — show the startling gap in the risks. In Chicago alone, 75,000 properties have a previously undisclosed flood risk. And minority communities often face a bigger share of hidden risk.

“Millions of home and property owners have had no way of knowing the significant risk they face,” said Matthew Eby, founder and executive director of the First Street Foundation, a group of academics and experts based in New York City who compiled the data, creating a website where people can check their own address.

[Vice-Regent]

As @FPizz pointed out. It's all over-valued and over-developed garbage land that is at risk. Cape May may be a rare exception but yeah. The only people who stand to lose much are the super wealthy. However the loss of mangroves and wetlands will entail an extinction threat for some species of birds and fish.

The way we live is completely wrong. Coastlines are the most valuable assets you could ever maintain because they protect you from oceanic pollution/overfishing and storm surge. Most coastlines should be human exclusion zones period. Only allowed for aesthetic and rewilding reasons.

[LibertyBell]

16 hours ago, Vice-Regent said:

As @FPizz pointed out. It's all over-valued and over-developed garbage land that is at risk. Cape May may be a rare exception but yeah. The only people who stand to lose much are the super wealthy. However the loss of mangroves and wetlands will entail an extinction threat for some species of birds and fish.

The way we live is completely wrong. Coastlines are the most valuable assets you could ever maintain because they protect you from oceanic pollution/overfishing and storm surge. Most coastlines should be human exclusion zones period. Only allowed for aesthetic and rewilding reasons.

If you go by 2020 alone, according to the latest numbers, we've had 22 billion dollar storms that have cost us 95 billion dollars in total.  It's the most number of billion dollar storms we've had and that's been on a rapid increase for the past 20 years or so.

 

 

 

[Silver Meteor]

On 1/14/2021 at 1:18 AM, LibertyBell said:

If you go by 2020 alone, according to the latest numbers, we've had 22 billion dollar storms that have cost us 95 billion dollars in total.  It's the most number of billion dollar storms we've had and that's been on a rapid increase for the past 20 years or so.

 

 

 

Currency debasement.

[LibertyBell]

 

[bluewave]