Paying for preparedness: Climate change

Regarding climate change, that much is abundantly clear. Even at a few tenths of a degree shy of the aspirational ceiling of 1.5 degrees Celsius (about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming above pre-industrial levels, the often-overwhelming impacts of extreme weather driven by the changing climate have hit hard in North America and beyond. During “our summer of hell,” as environmental author Jeff Goodell recently framed it in Rolling Stone, about a third of Americans have been hit by a weather disaster. We’ve had a killer heat dome in the Pacific Northwest, savage wildfires, devastating floods, and suffered a terrible toll from Hurricane Ida. Globally, a recent study showed that nearly 10,000 additional heat deaths per year can be directly attributed to human-induced global warming. And a comprehensive new report from the World Meteorological Organization calculated that disasters caused by weather have multiplied and are causing seven times more damage today than in the 1970s.