{"id":55027,"date":"2020-09-13T14:19:08","date_gmt":"2020-09-13T19:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55027"},"modified":"2020-09-13T14:19:08","modified_gmt":"2020-09-13T19:19:08","slug":"catastrophic-hurricanes-are-the-new-normal-and-they-will-cost-trillions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55027","title":{"rendered":"Catastrophic Hurricanes Are the \u2018New Normal,\u2019 and They Will Cost Trillions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Catastrophic Hurricanes Are the \u2018New Normal,\u2019 and They Will Cost Trillions<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Taxpayers and already struggling communities are largely bearing the brunt of the costs for climate change-fueled disasters created by big oil and big business.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cWe got a little bit lucky,\u201d said President Donald Trump about the storm which killed at least six people in Louisiana, ripped apart buildings, left more than half a million homes without power, and triggered a chemical fire from an industrial plant over Lake Charles.<\/p>\n

Of course, Trump was glad he didn\u2019t have to postpone his speech at the Republican National Convention.<\/p>\n

But while Hurricane Laura did not, thankfully, produce the catastrophic storm surge some predicted\u2014weakening into a tropical storm\u2014it represents an unmistakably escalating trend of extreme weather events due to increasing global temperatures.<\/p>\n

Hurricane Laura had followed hot on the heels of Hurricane Marco. The Atlantic hurricane season has already broken records with 13 named storms, which meteorologists consider\u00a0well above-normal<\/a>\u00a0activity.<\/p>\n

Recently published scientific studies suggest that the devastation wrought by Laura, and the potential catastrophe only narrowly avoided, are likely to become a \u2018new normal\u2019 if we continue to pump carbon emissions into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Billion dollar disasters<\/strong><\/p>\n

Earlier in August, the US-based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0a major report on exactly this issue, titled\u00a0Climate Change-Fueled Weather Disasters: Costs to State and Local Economies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The report brought together data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database with other studies, to build a stark picture of what we now know about extreme weather risks.<\/p>\n

The report points out that since 1980, the number of extreme weather events per year in the United States has increased fourfold, with annual direct cost of these disasters increasing fivefold.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Catastrophic Hurricanes Are the \u2018New Normal,\u2019 and They Will Cost Trillions Taxpayers and already struggling communities are largely bearing the brunt of the costs for climate change-fueled disasters created by big oil and big business. \u201cWe got a little bit lucky,\u201d said President Donald Trump about the storm which killed at least six people in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2688,141,8479,2092,13929],"class_list":["post-55027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-big-oil","tag-climate-change","tag-hurricanes","tag-nafeez-ahmed","tag-vice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55028,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55027\/revisions\/55028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}