President Joe Biden speaks about lowering health care costs in the Indian Treaty Room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington, Wednesday, April 3, 2024. for its climate and disaster tracking project and found it inflated damages and made inexplicable data calculations that did not factor in obvious contributions to disaster costs, such as an increase in development in coastal regions and other areas vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding or wildfires.
“Every degree of global warming we avoid matters because each increment of warming is expected to lead to more damage and greater economic losses in the United States. Each climate action taken to reduce and avoid warming reduces those risks and harmful impacts,” Biden administration officials said in the announcement.’s assessment, from 1980 to 2023 there were 8.5 weather disasters on average annually that caused losses exceeding $1 billion. The number surged to 20.
Hurricane Harvey, which struck Texas in 2017, was initially estimated to have caused $60 billion in damage at the time, which is $74 billion in 2023 dollars.’s 2023 billion dollar disaster database, the cost of Harvey inflated again to more than $156 billion, an increase of 209% over the original estimate.