Billions in U.S. tropical cyclone economic losses could be attributable to climate change: study

Between US$2 billion and US$14 billion of recorded annual economic losses related to tropical cyclones in the year 2005 in the United States could be attributable to climate change, suggests a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The article, titled Economic losses from US hurricanes consistent with an influence from climate change, examined economic losses from tropical cyclones in the U.S. using a regression-based approach. This approach was used instead of a standard normalization procedure to study changes in exposure and vulnerability “to minimize the chance of introducing a spurious trend,” the study’s abstract said.

The authors were from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and VU University in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, among others.

The study notes that the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events have changed over time, but the observed increases in natural disaster losses are often thought to result solely from societal change, such as increases in exposure and vulnerability. However, unlike previous studies, this time the researchers used statistical models to estimate the contributions of socioeconomic factors to the observed trend in losses and accounted for non-normal and nonlinear characteristics of loss data.

“We identify an upward trend in economic losses between 1900 and 2005 that cannot be explained by commonly used socioeconomic variables,” the study authors wrote. “Based on records of geophysical data, we identify an upward trend in both the number and intensity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic basin as well as in the number of loss-generating tropical cyclone records in the United States that is consistent with the smoothed global average rise in surface air temperature.”

Using this data, the researchers estimated that, in 2005, between US$2 billion and US$14 billion of the recorded annual losses could be attributable to climate change – 2% to 12% of that year’s normalized losses.

“We suggest that damages from tropical cyclones cannot be dismissed when evaluating the current and future costs of climate change and the expected benefits of mitigation and adaptation strategies,” the abstract concluded.