National Natural Disasters in 2017

From 1980 to 2016, according to Noaa records, the US experienced an average of five and a half $1bn-plus “weather and climate disasters” a year. From 2012 to 2016, that reached 10.6 such events a year.

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Even before Hurricane Harvey began to form, out in the north Atlantic, federal climate experts signalled that 2017 was going to be a bad year for weather and climate catastrophes in America.

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This “rapid succession of [nine] disaster events” from 1 January to 7 July 2017 was part of a years-long increaseand cost a total of $16bn and 57 lives. Such events included flooding in California, Missouri and Arkansas; hailstorms in Colorado and Minnesota; and a sudden, crop-killing spring freeze across South Carolina and Georgia that destroyed an abnormally early fruit blossom.

[...]

“The trend in these disasters is clearly up and that reflects more extreme weather events, including more ‘big rain’ events that show up as flooding, and also reflects where people live and how valuable their assets are,” Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch of Noaa National Climate Data Center, told the Guardian.

[...]

It is possible that on top of this, economic damage from Harvey will exceed the inflation-adjusted $160bn cost of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Noaa experts told the Guardian.

But despite Noaa’s work to track what is happening to climate, weather and the oceans, and how society is affected and might react, Donald Trump proposed earlier this year slashing the administration’s budget by almost $1bn. That would cut US and international research as well as funding for other environmental studies and protections.

  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.