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New Years is a funny holiday. It lets us reflect on the things that “went wrong” in the previous year, and “resolve” to find the common human decency to pull together in the brand new year, to try and do better.
If only making course corrections for the Climate Change problem was amenable to our best-of-intentions resolutions.
by Gitanjali Poonia , Desert News — Dec 27, 2021
The 10 most extreme weather disasters in the world, driven by climate change, caused a total of $170.3 billion damage, $20 billion more than last year, per a new study.
Each of these disasters caused at least $1.5 billion in damage. Hurricane Ida cost $65 billion, making it the most costly.
These disasters have killed at least 1,075 people and displaced 1.3 million, per CBS News.
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Per Axios, Insurer Aon has warned that 2021 will be the sixth time natural catastrophes have cost more than $100 billion.
The most costly weather disasters, in 2021, according to Christian Aid.
- Hurricane Ida — $65 billion.
- European floods — $43 billion.
- Texas winter storm —$23 billion.
- Henan floods (China) — $17.6 billion.
- British Columbia floods — $7.5 billion.
- France’s “cold wave” — $5.6 billion.
- Cyclone Yaas (India, Bangladesh) — $3 billion
- Australian floods — $2.1 billion.
- Typhoon In-fa (China, Philippines, Japan) — $2 billion.
- Cyclone Tauktae (India, Sri Lanka, Maldives) — $1.5 billion.
Let’s see, amortize these Climate Damage costs over the next 10 years, assuming they don’t go up (an unfounded assumption) — and we can expect additional costs of at least:
$170,300,000,000 X 10 years = $1.7 Trillion
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These are the additional Climate Damage costs — if we do nothing to address Climate Change — like Senator Manchin wants us to do. And guess what Joe — these additional costs for the most part — are UNPAID FOR, unlike the Build Back Better Bill, which has provisions to actually PAY FOR its economic recovery spending.
And this says nothing about the untold thousands of homes disrupted, and lives loss, all because Mr. Manchin would rather invest in old school tech, than do what scientists say is needed to mitigate this fright-train of Climate damage.
Guess which disasters happened too late in 2021 to make this Greatest Hits List — the Kentucky Mega Tornadoes and the Colorado Fire Hurricanes.
The damage toll just went up AGAIN. Way up.
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We ignore these future freight-trains, at our own peril. We must act with urgency and expediency to forestall future “climate events” — like our lives and our livelihoods depended on it.
Because, as more of us are coming to directly realize, they certainly do.
We only have One Earth. We should start acting that way. And invest WHATEVER IT TAKES to mitigate this horrendous, unrelenting Climate Chaos future.
We WILL be paying for it — one way or another. Just wait.
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