by Daniel J. Weiss, Jackie Weidman, and Mackenzie Bronson

The devastating and tragic Hurricane Sandy and its connected storms caused a huge swath of destruction in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States on October 29, before then dumping vast quantities of snow in the Midwest. The storm is responsible for at least 110 fatalities in the United States and preliminary estimates indicate that it caused $30 billion in damages, with only one-quarter to one-half covered by insurance. It may be one of the costliest U.S. hurricanes in history.

Unfortunately, Sandy is only the latest in a line of extreme weather events that severely afflicted Americans over the past two years. This includes destructive wildfires in Colorado, record-breaking temperatures across the nation, and severe thunderstorms and tornadoes across the Midwest. Farmers in the Great Plains are expecting to harvest just a fraction of their corn and other crops this year as the worst drought in 50 years plagues nearly two-thirds of the nation. Vicious heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and severe storms left more than 1,000 people dead. These are the extreme weather events that scientists predict will become more frequent and/or severe if the industrial carbon pollution responsible for climate change remains unchecked.

Scientists and government agencies documented the devastating extreme weather events in 2011 and 2012. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported 14 weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damages each in 2011. By our estimates, from January through October 2012, there were at least seven additional extreme weather events with more than $1 billion in damages each, with total damages from the two years combined topping $126 billion. In addition to these events, economists predict that the 2012 drought will cause between $28 billion and $77 billion in damages, potentially bringing the two-year total to $174 billion.

The events during this time affected all but 4 of the lower 48 states. A recent study by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm, found that North America is experiencing a tremendous rise in extreme weather disasters-a nearly fivefold increase over the past three decades. The firm concluded that this is due to climate change and that this trend will continue in the future.

One overlooked aspect of these disasters, however, is the rate at which they harm middle-and lower-income households-people who are less able to quickly recover from such disasters. This Center for American Progress analysis finds that on average, counties with middle-and lower-income households were harmed by many of the most expensive extreme weather events in 2011 and 2012. (see Table 1)

Most of these extreme weather events typically harmed counties with household incomes below the U.S. median annual household income of $51,914:

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by Daniel J. Weiss and Jackie Weidman

Our thoughts and prayers are with the millions of Americans harmed by Hurricane Sandy. Its devastating winds, rains, and ocean surges caused a huge swath of destruction in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States before dumping vast quantities of snow in the Midwest. Sandy is responsible for at least 74 fatalities, and preliminary estimates indicate that it could cause $20 billion in property damage with only one-quarter to one-half covered by insurance. It may be one of the costliest U.S. hurricanes ever.

Unfortunately, Sandy is only the latest in a line of recent extreme weather events that have severely afflicted Americans in the past two years. Other disasters include the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, record-breaking temperatures across the nation, and severe thunderstorms and tornadoes across the Midwest. Farmers in the Midwest are expecting to harvest just a fraction of their corn and other crops this year, leading to record federal crop insurance payments due to the worst drought in 50 years that plagued two-thirds of the nation. Vicious heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and severe storms left hundreds of people dead and injured. These are the extreme weather events that scientists predict will become more frequent and/or severe if the industrial carbon pollution responsible for climate change remains unchecked.

Scientists and government agencies have documented the devastating extreme weather events in 2011 and 2012. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that there were a record-high 14 weather events in 2011 that caused at least $1 billion each in damages. By our estimates there were at least seven additional events with more than $1 billion each in damages in 2012, with total combined damages from the two years topping $67 billion. In addition to these events, economists predict that the 2012 drought will cause between $28 billion and $77 billion in damages, potentially bringing the two-year damage total to $95 billion to $144 billion. During this time, all but five of the lower 48 states were affected by one or more of these events. (see table below)

Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurance firm, found that North America is experiencing a tremendous rise in extreme weather disasters—a nearly fivefold increase over the past three decades. It reported that, “There has been a 35 percent increase in the size of storms in the Gulf of Mexico since 1995.” It also concluded that this is due to climate change, and that this trend will continue in the future.

Climate science deniers are eager to claim that no single weather occurrence is definitely caused by climate change. Though that is technically correct, is is very misleading because scientists found that climate change does indeed affect our weather in clearly debilitating ways. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research notes that, “All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”

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by Mike Tidwell

What might Hurricane Sandy do to New York City? See excerpts below from my 2006 book The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities. It’s a depressing title meant to help shock us into preventing these worst-case scenarios from coming true via global climate change. But it might now be too late for parts of imperiled New York.

As you read, keep in mind that as of Sunday night October 28th, the National Hurricane Center was forecasting that the storm could hit anywhere between Delaware and Rhode Island, with a surge tide as high as 11 feet in some places. Even if New York City avoids a direct strike, it is still facing a potentially “worst-case scenario” in terms of surge tides.

As the East Coast braces for a possible direct hit from Hurricane Sandy, meteorologists are closely watching the storm’s “freak” formation. They’re calling it “unprecedented and bizarre,” a “perfect storm,” and a “frankenstorm” that could cause historic storm surges, last for multiple days, and cause over a billion dollars in damage.

After hitting Jamaica and heading toward the Bahamas, experts say it’s likely that Sandy could swing into the Northeast and hit the coast somewhere between Washington, DC and Boston, impacting people all along the Atlantic seaboard. Projections for Sandy’s path are still uncertain, but models show that the threat is increasing.

A confluence of factors are coming together to make the storm unprecedented. As Sandy moves through the Atlantic, it is expected to combine with an early winter storm from the continental U.S., causing pressure to drop — potentially reaching pressure levels of a category 3 or 4 hurricane with winds over 115 miles per hour.

Brian Norcross of the Weather Channel described the storm this way on his facebook page: “This is a beyond-strange situation. It’s unprecedented and bizarre. ”

Another factor under consideration is climate change. Like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace. And like a baseball player on steroids, it’s the wrong question to ask whether a given home run is “caused” by steroids.

As Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, has written, all superstorms “are affected by climate change”:

The air is on average warmer and moister than it was prior to about 1970 and in turn has likely led to a 5–10 % effect on precipitation and storms that is greatly amplified in extremes. The warm moist air is readily advected onto land and caught up in weather systems as part of the hydrological cycle, where it contributes to more intense precipitation events that are widely observed to be occurring.

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by Richard Sommerville and Jeff Masters, via Climate Communication

With oppressive heat waves, devastating droughts, ravaging wildfires, and hard-hitting rainstorms, the summer of 2012 has been one for the record books. Thousands of precipitation and temperature records were broken, plaguing almost all of the contiguous United States this season and underscoring the connection between climate change and increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather. With climate change, we’ve set the stage for precisely this kind of extreme weather, and unfortunately, our changing climate threatens to alter summers to come.

It is important to note that as the planet continues to warm, new high temperature records and some other types of extremes will increasingly occur, but where they occur in a given year will not be predictable due to natural modes of climate variability. Extreme weather pummeled the United States this summer, but the next few years might see the most dramatic extremes occurring elsewhere around the world. Regardless, record-breaking high temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and heavy downpours are all signs of new extreme weather patterns that we can expect to see more of in a warming world, both domestically and abroad.

Here’s a roundup of weather events during the record-breaking summer of 2012:

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How much extra energy are we putting in the atmosphere through emission of greenhouse gases? One Australian researcher put it into context: “The radiative forcing of the CO2 we have already put in the atmosphere in the last century is … the equivalent in energy terms to almost half a billion Hiroshima bombs each year.”

With more energy radiating down on the planet rather than back up into space, the planet continues to heat up. As the atmosphere warms, it is able to hold more water vapor — thus strengthening the global hydrological cycle.

With all that extra energy, more water is pulled out of the subtropic regions and moved toward higher-precipitation areas in the subpolar regions, resulting in stronger droughts and stronger storms. Or, as the video below explains, how the wet gets wetter and the dry gets drier.

Through five decades of observations and future climate modeling, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has put together this educational piece on how a warming planet will make weather more extreme:

by Mindy Lubber, via Ceres

Severe weather has been clobbering insurance companies, and the headlines just keep coming. “Drought to cost insurers billions in losses,” said the Financial Times a few days ago. “Many U.S. hurricanes would cause $10b or more in losses in 2012 dollars,” the Boston Globe said about the latest hurricane forecasts. “June’s severe weather losses near $2 billion in U.S.,” said the Insurance Journal earlier this year.

This year’s extreme events follow the world’s costliest year ever for natural catastrophe losses, including $32 billion in 2011 insured losses in the United States due to extreme weather events. This is no short-term uptick: insured losses due to extreme weather have been trending upward for 30 years, as the climate has changed and populations in coastal areas and other vulnerable places have grown.

The U.S. insurance industry continues to be “surprised” by extreme weather losses. But the truth is that weather extremes are no longer surprising. Back-to-back summers of devastating droughts, record heat waves and raging wildfires are clear evidence of this. Last year’s crazy weather triggered near record underwriting losses and numerous credit rating downgrades among U.S. property and casualty insurers.

And in the face of a changing climate, such events can be expected to increase in number, and severity.  It’s time for insurance companies to recognize this new normal, and incorporate it into their business planning—for the sake of their shareholders, their industry’s survival, and the stability of the U.S. economy.

Ceres, a business sustainability leadership organization, has been researching the effects of climate change and severe weather on the insurance sector. In a report to be released next month, titled Stormy Future for U.S. Property and Casualty Insurers, we will detail our recommendations for insurance companies, investors and regulators to help strengthen the insurance sector so it can better weather the challenges ahead.

For insurance companies, using catastrophe models that can better anticipate probable effects of climate change on extreme weather events are key. And especially in vulnerable markets, insurers’ guidance on insurability should inform decisions that communities make on land-use planning, infrastructure decisions, and building codes.

Insurers can also encourage the transition to a low-carbon economy—one built to forestall the worst effects of climate change—by offering products and services that encourage clean and efficient energy, encouraging customers to adopt climate-change mitigation plans, and encouraging policymakers to act to reduce carbon pollution.

This would not be the first time insurance companies have helped change American society. By making insurance contingent on smoke detectors, insurers cut down on deaths and losses from building fires. By backing seat belt laws and including seat belt violations in rate calculations, they helped save lives on the road.

By engaging fully on climate change and energy policy—inside and outside of the boardroom – insurance companies can lead the way once again. It would be the right thing to do, both for their business, and for our future.

Mindy Lubber is President of Ceres and Director of the Investor Network on Climate Risk. This piece was originally published at Ceres and was reprinted with permission.

by Michael Kodas, via OnEarth

Praying for rain is common when your state is beset by record-setting blazes, but as always, be careful what you wish for. Heavy downpours create their own hazards. The irony was highlighted for me two weeks ago when the city of Colorado Springs found itself simultaneously under a “red flag” fire warning and a flash flood warning.

The good news is that monsoon rains in Colorado over the last week helped firefighters bring an end to the High Park Fire in the foothills above Fort Collins, as well as Colorado Springs’s Waldo Canyon fire, which was declared 100 percent contained Tuesday night. Between them, the two most destructive wildfires in Colorado history burned nearly 600 homes, so no one was sad to see them quenched.

But before the firefighters had even finished scratching their firelines around the blazes, residents were facing new threats — including floods fed by runoff from the burnt land, along with mudslides, debris flows, and contaminated water supplies, all a result of the heavy downpours that fell over the weekend.

Like wildfires, powerful afternoon thunderstorms are a regular part of Colorado’s summer. (The National Weather Service reported that one area between Denver and Colorado Springs received 2.5 inches of rain in an hour last Friday afternoon.) But when fires and floods mix, bad things happen: a mudslide from the High Park burn zone covered the highway with ash, branches, and black mud up to a foot deep; volunteers filled thousands of sandbags to protect their neighbors’ homes and used snowplows to clear ash and mud; and the Cache la Poudre River turned as black and turbid as India ink when inundated with the ash and cinders from fire runoff.

Post-wildfire debris flows can destroy houses, bury or wash out roads, contaminate reservoirs, block drainages and water pipes, and threaten lives. Some flows are strong enough to carry boulders, automobiles, and parts of houses. Debris flows that followed Southern California wildfires in 2003 killed 16 people on Christmas Day that year. In 1994, after the South Canyon fire killed 14 firefighters near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, debris flows crossed Interstate 70, overrunning Jersey barriers, burying 30 cars, and pushing some of them into the Colorado River. Miraculously, there were no fatalities.

But the threat from the combination of fire and water can last for years, or decades. Initially the grasses, shrubs, and small trees that would hold soil in place are burned away. Larger trees that are killed by fire leave their roots in the ground, and as those decay or give way during the coming years, they perpetuate the risk of debris flows. Flows from 2002’s Hayman fire, Colorado’s largest on record, destroyed homes and washed out a highway four years after the fire.

But the longest-term threat in Colorado is to the water itself.

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by Sarah Woodhouse

Alberto, Beryl, Chris and Debby.

If you’re lucky enough not to have met them in person, these are the four tropical systems big enough to be named so far in the 2012 hurricane season. And we’re only in July. Though experts say it doesn’t necessarily signal a pattern for the season as a whole, it has been a busy and early start (the average date for the fourth named storm to occur is Sept. 1).

But as Florida residents mop up after two feet of drenching rains in some locations after tropical storm Debby, there is finally some good news from Washington on policy to lessen the destruction from flooding that these and other types of storms cause for people and property.

On Friday, both houses of Congress reached agreement and voted to pass a transportation bill, which is expected to be signed into law by President Barack Obama this week. Among the provisions included in the bill that will benefit America’s natural resources is a measure to reform the National Flood Insurance Program, which requires property owners in flood-risk areas to buy federal insurance.

The reforms passed last week will discourage and guide development away from freshwater and coastal floodplains, while better informing the public about the dangers to people and properties of flood risk. More specifically it will:

1) phase out subsidies that have undermined the financial stability of the program;

2) require the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to ensure maps are updated and accurate so that people understand and can better prepare for their risks; and

3) streamline and strengthen mitigation programs to help decrease flood risks and better protect flood-exposed communities, homes and businesses.

Without this action, American taxpayers would have been asked to continue subsidizing public and private development in flood risk areas, doing nothing to fix the financial drain of this program  – which is $18 billion in debt.

In this case a perfect storm of aligned interests was a good thing in terms of tackling a federal program long in need of reform. Advocates for taxpayers and debt reduction, environmentalists, community planners and the insurance and real estate industries all formed an unexpected coalition to urge Congressional action on flood insurance reform.

Cost savings paired with prudent planning and mitigation designed to avoid damages before they occur, brought these groups together. The Nature Conservancy joined with allies such as the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, and a diverse group of organizations who pushed for changes.

Studies have found that for every $1 spent on flood mitigation efforts, $5 is saved. That’s an important statistic considering that federal funding spent on flood damages in the first decade of this century has increased to an annual average of over $10 Billion, a 2.5 fold increase from the 1950s.

Many provisions in the bill recognize the flood protection value of our nation’s floodplains and will help to preserve these important natural systems that also deliver additional public benefits such as improving water quality, providing spawning areas for fish and habitat for other plants and animals, and providing recreational opportunities. And for the first time, when mapping flood risk areas, the bill requires the consideration of our changing climate and the accompanying processes such as sea level rise and changing precipitation patterns which are affecting flooding around the country.

Results from scientific studies indicate that a changing climate has exacerbated and will continue to intensify extreme weather events including flooding and coastal storms. A report commissioned by FEMA indicates there will be a 40 to 45 percent increase in U.S. areas susceptible to flooding over the next century. And, newly published research (Holland and Bruyere 2012) finds that the percentage of category 4-5 hurricanes has doubled from about 20% to about 40% in only 35 years.

As we face the storms and floods of the future, at least many positive changes will now be made to the nation’s flood insurance, leaving the program on higher, more solid ground.

Sarah Woodhouse Murdock is Acting Director of Climate Change Adaptation Policy for The Nature Conservancy.