The federal government spent nearly $62 billion for disaster relief in fiscal years 2011 and 2012, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress. And these federal funds only cover a portion of the price tag exacted by extreme weather; private insurance and individuals harmed by the events also spent billions of dollars.
In these two years alone, there were 25 severe storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires that each caused more than $1 billion in economic damages, with a total price tag of $188 billion.
There is new evidence that climate change played a role in the extreme weather events of 2012. A recently released analysis from the American Meteorological Society, for example, determined that:
Approximately half the analyses found some evidence that anthropogenically caused climate change was a contributing factor to the extreme event examined, though the effects of natural fluctuations of weather and climate on the evolution of many of the extreme events played key roles as well.
Interestingly, many of the states that received the most federal recovery aid to cope with climate-linked extreme weather have federal legislators who are climate-science deniers. The ten states that received the most federal recovery aid […]