by B. B. Cael
This study analyzes economic damages in NOAA’s database of US billion-dollar weather and climate disasters from 1980 to 2024, to predict near-future damages and to contextualize historical damages. Damages are well-described by a statistical model with two categories—severe storms and other disasters—with nonstationary Poisson frequencies and Generalized Pareto magnitudes. The increased frequency of billion-dollar severe storms is most plausibly due to climate change, while increased magnitudes of severe storms’ and other disasters’ damages are most plausibly due to increased exposure and vulnerability respectively. Damages from disasters over the rest of this decade are estimated; there is a 54% chance that damages exceed $1tn over 2026–2030. In economic damage terms, Hurricane Katrina was not an outlier but rather an expected outcome, statistically speaking (i.e., the 32nd percentile of the expected maximum damage distribution). These results underscore the value of continuing to catalog climate disasters and bolstering resilience and preparedness.