Climate change: Bigger hurricanes are now more damaging

[nitpicker]

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50380431

Climate change: Bigger hurricanes are now more damaging

By Matt McGrath
Environment correspondent

11 November 2019

The biggest and most damaging hurricanes are now three times more frequent than they were 100 years ago, say researchers. Using a new method of calculating the destruction, the scientists say the increase in frequency is "unequivocal".

Previous attempts to isolate the impact of climate change on hurricanes have often came up with conflicting results. But the new study says the increase in damage caused by these big cyclones is linked by global warming.
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Previous research has concluded that the rise in damages was related to wealth, and not to any statistically significant change in frequency.

However this new paper challenges that view.

Instead of looking at economic damage, the authors looked at the amount of land that was totally destroyed by more than 240 storms between 1900 and 2018, based on insurance industry databases.

As an example, the researchers examined Hurricane Irma that hit Florida in 2017. Around 1.1 million people were living inside the 10,000 sq km closest to the storm's landfall.

With the wealth per capita estimated to be $194,000, the scientists concluded that the overall wealth in this 10,000 sq km region was $215bn.

As the storm caused $50bn worth of damage, this was 23% of the wealth in the region. Taking 23% of the 10,000 sq km gave an area of total destruction of 2,300 sq km.

By working out similar figures for events across the last century, the researchers were able to make what they say are more realistic comparisons in terms of damage over the decades.

The authors found that the frequency of the most damaging hurricanes had increased by a rate of 330% per century. And they believe that is mainly due to rising temperatures
(snip)

[Mike 03]

1. There's a fantastic book on this subject if anyone wants to dig deeper

It's called The Geography of Risk, by Gilbert M. Gaul. The book covers a wide range of issues related to flooding and hurricanes but is especially focused on the escalating amount of damage and cost of hurricanes, and also discusses why they are becoming larger and more violent, and why our practice here in the US of federally subsidizing rebuilding after hurricanes and floods (or building miles of sea walls and shoveling sand around to make "berms" that wash away every year) makes no sense and is financially unsustainable to a degree that it could bankrupt the country in the future.