Tag: Billion Dollar Disasters

Climate Change and a Review of the Severe Weather of 2025. 

There has always been severe weather, we all know that. In the Odyssey, Odysseus’ ship is destroyed in a storm and he alone survives to be washed up onto the shore of Calypso’ island. History records dozens of battles that have been won or lost because bad weather had damaged one side more than the other. Our modern Climate Change deniers use these facts as an argument against global warming because there’s always been bad weather.

In the Odyssey the hero Odysseus is forced to endure a storm at sea created by the god Poseidon. Many an ancient mariner’s tale deals with severe weather. (Credit: Look and Learn)

The facts say something much different however. Measured values taken around the world tell us that the last ten years have been the hottest ten years ever reliably measured, basically since the late 19th century. In fact 2024 stands as the hottest year ever measured, and is thought to be the hottest year since before the Ice Ages began. Although the data is still coming in it is thought that 2025 was only slightly cooler, and will stand as either the second or third hottest year ever. In fact, if you take the average of 2023, 2024 and 2025 then the Earth’s temperature has for three straight years gone over the +1.5ºC above pre-industrial temperatures that the nations of the world promised to stay below in the Paris accords and above which scientists have warned the world will begin to suffer greatly from climate change.

Global temperatures since the year 2000. A blind man can see where we’re headed, and it isn’t a good place! (Credit: World Meteorological Organization WHO)

So let’s take a look at the severe weather around the globe in 2025 to see if the weather was significantly more destructive than just a couple of decades ago. By a strange coincidence we shall begin and end our survey in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Just a year ago this is what the US’s second largest city looked like. To the climate deniers who say dealing with global warming will ruin the economy, won’t this? (Credit: United Nations University)

As 2025 began southern California was in the midst of yet another drought but thanks to the extreme heat of 2024 this drought was as bad as any ever recorded. When combined with stronger than ever Santa Ana winds, another effect of 2024’s heat, the fires that ignited in Palisades and Eaton exploded, burning for weeks, destroying whole neighborhoods and killing over 400 people. The damage from the LA fires has been estimated at almost $60 billion dollars making it the third costliest disaster in US history. And 2025 was just getting started. By the end of 2025 the US had endured 23 separate disasters each causing over $1 Billion in damage for a total of $115 billion in economic loss!

The number of billion dollar disasters continues to grow as does the cost of the disasters themselves. Again this is an economic cost that will only increase. (Credit: Climate Central)

One undeniable effect of climate change over the last decade or so has been the enormous growth in wildfires around the world. Surprisingly enough the US experienced a fairly normal year for wildfires in 2025 but the same could not be said for our neighbor to the north. In 2025 Canadian wildfires destroyed almost 22 million acres of forest making this year the Second worst in Canada’s history.

The smoke from Canada’s wildfires spread across much of the US impacting the health of millions. (Credit: Newsweek)

The rest of the world suffered as well with the United Kingdom experiencing its worst ever recorded wildfire season. The same was true for Portugal and northwestern Spain along with South Korea while Greece and Turkey saw very bad wildfires, just not quite as bad as the ones they saw in 2024.

The British Isles are not usually thought of as a place threatened by wildfires. However, 2025 was their worst fire season ever recorded. (Credit: Royal Meteorological Society)

Meanwhile drought conditions and heat waves struck many regions of the world not used to such environments while increasing in severity in places where they are more common. The droughts in Syria, Iraq and Iran are especially severe with only a trickle of the once mighty Tigris River remaining. There are even reports that the Iranian government is considering evacuating its capital Teheran, a city of 15 million people because there is just no water remaining in the city’s reservoirs. At the same time the droughts across northern Africa have continued unabated for the last several years with an ever greater number of people being subjected to famine.

Some of the Reservoirs for Iran’s capital Teheran are simply empty. The recent protests in Iran have as much to do with the water shortage as the country’s economic woes. Again, climate change going hand in hand with a bad economy. (Credit: The Globalist)

This year also brought a higher than average tropical storm season but in the Atlantic we got lucky. In the Atlantic there were three Category five hurricanes, tying for the most in any year with 2005, along with one Cat 4 storms but only one Hurricane, Melissa made landfall. Still that one storm caused an enormous amount of damage to Jamaica, Haiti and eastern Cuba. While climate change cannot be named as the cause for any particular storm, nevertheless it has been estimated that Melissa’s winds and rainfall were increased by somewhere between 15-30% due to global warming. In the Pacific on the other hand several Typhoons did make landfall resulting in considerable destruction in the Philippines and South Korea.

We dodged a bullet with respect to hurricanes in 2025. Three big Cat 5 storms but only Melissa made a landfall, doing a great deal of damage. It could have been much worse! (Credit:WPDE)

But of all the different types of severe weather it was probably flooding that caused the most damage in 2025. The most intense floods occurred in Indonesia and India where an estimated 1,800 people died in each event. Another severe flood hit China during June through August killing an estimated 30 people, if you trust Chinese media. Here in the US there were several flooding events, the worst being the Kerr County, Texas flood that killed over 135 people.

In the end over 40 people, many of them children would die because of the intense flooding in Texas over the July 4th weekend. Warmer air can contain more moisture, that’s all there is to it!!! (Credit: YouTube)

There were also floods in the Mississippi valley, the state of Washington and finally, bringing us back to where we began, over the Christmas holidays Los Angeles and other areas of California were hit by extreme rainfalls that caused landslides and much flooding. All told the damage in just the top ten severe weather events in 2025 has been estimated to be over 115 billion dollars, not counting all of the people killed.

Many of the same areas that experienced wildfires in January of 2025 saw flooding in December. Every year the weather just keeps getting worse and will until we stop emitting greenhouse gasses. (Credit: Capital & Main)

This kind of destruction is unprecedented and is growing ever greater as the world’s temperature increases. There is some good news in the fact that renewable energy sources are now so inexpensive that most of the world’s new power generating project are wind or solar. Still in 2025 the human race increased the amount of green house gasses it spewed into the atmosphere. We still are not even trying to control our emissions.

Climate Change Review for the year 2024; The Hottest year ever recorded for the World. 

The year 2024 has been over for more than a month now and although scientists are still evaluating all of the Climate measurements that they obtained during the past year the broad outline of Global Warming’s impact on our planet is clear. The year 2024 was simply the hottest year ever recorded in human history, erasing the record set just the year before in 2023. In fact the ten hottest years ever recorded have all occurred in the last ten years.

And this was BEFORE 2024 was declared the hottest year ever! So really the 11 hottest years ever recorded have been the last 11 years! (Credit: Climate Central)

For the world as a whole the temperature in 2024 was measured as being 1.6ºC above pre-industrial levels, that baseline being as measured from the years 1850 to 1900. The world’s temperature not only exceeded the previous record from 2023 but did so but did so by more than a tenth of a degree, +0.12ºC, an enormous jump. Indeed, over the last two years temperatures worldwide have been so hot that they have surpassed most models of global warming, leading some climate scientists to fear that global warming is actually accelerating. A few statistics that illustrate just how fast the temperatures are climbing worldwide in 2024 are that for every cold temperature record that was set fifty record high temperature we set. At the same time six of the world’s seven continents recorded their hottest years ever, only Asia bucked the trend recording its second hottest year ever.

The World in 2024. Very few areas were colder than average while the vast majority of our globe was hotter, often much hotter than average. (Credit: National Centers for Environmental Information)

That figure of 1.6ºC of course breaks the target figure of limiting global temperature to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels that was set back in the Paris accords of 2015. Now that goal was intended to be an average over a decade or more so we haven’t failed yet. However the last two years have averaged over the 1.5ºC goal and we’re still not really doing anything to control global warming, to reduce if not eliminate the amount of green house gasses that we are dumping into the atmosphere.

In the nine years since the great majority of the world’s nations agreed to the Paris accords virtually nothing has actually been accomplished. (Credit: Yale MacMillian Center, Yale University)

In fact we are actually pumping more greenhouse gasses into the sky. Measurements of CO2 levels at the weather station at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, indicate that in 2024 CO2 in the atmosphere increased by 3.58 parts per million, that’s the largest increase since records began there in 1958. Not all of the increase has come from burning fossil fuels; a lot is coming from all of the wildfires that are increasing in number and intensity. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now 50% higher than it was back in 1900 and most models of climate change agree that another such large increase as happened in 2024 will eliminate all hope of keeping below the Paris agreed 1.5ºC limit.

In fact, we are still actually increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses being emitted into the atmosphere, with no end in sight! (Credit: Carbon Brief)

So much for the temperature measurements for 2024, the effect of all that heat on climate disasters throughout the world is not hard to find. There were the extreme droughts in Italy, southern Africa, the Amazon and the American Southwest as well as the excessive rainfall in Ireland, Spain, Southern India and the Philippines. Add to that the severe storms that ravaged both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans like Hurricanes Helene and Milton along with Typhoon Gaemi in the Pacific. Of course there were heat waves around the planet such as those in the American Southwest, Central Europe and China. In the United States the number of ‘billion dollar’ disasters’ in 2024 was 27, an unprecedented number as was the total dollar figure for the damage 182.7 billion.

The billion dollar disasters for the US in 2024. The total value came to more than 180 billion dollars along with more than 500 lives. And it’s only going to get worse! (Credit: Climate.gov)

Between the years 1980 and 2010 the yearly number of weather disasters averaged about 8 but over the last five years it has ballooned to more than 20, an exponential growth rate. It’s worth pointing out that if the trend continues, the destruction caused by extreme weather will in a few years generate a considerable stress on the American economy. That possibility is causing a growing fear within the insurance industry, which has to pay their costumers for any damage to property by the weather.

In the last six years two million homes have been refused insurance because of the risk generated by climate change. Of course, most of those homes are in states like California and Florida that experience the worst effects of global warming but even in my home state of Pennsylvania it has begun. (Credit: New York Times)

Because of that many insurance companies are now refusing to accept customers in ‘high risk’ areas of the country such as in wildfire areas in California or hurricane prone parts of Florida. However remember that much of the damage done by hurricane Helene occurred in the western mountains of North Carolina, an area generally considered safe from severe weather. So in just a few years the question will be, is any part of our country, any part of the world safe from severe weather. 

Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida as a Cat 4 causing destruction all the way up even into North Carolina. (Credit: ABC45)

Of course it’s not just property that’s harmed by severe weather, there’s a cost in human lives as well. For example, in those ‘billion dollar’ disasters mentioned above 418 Americans were directly killed, 225 by hurricane Helene alone. Now, I just said directly caused by weather disasters, that figure doesn’t include all of the people whose lives were shortened by extreme heat, such as the 113 consecutive days above 100ºF in Phoenix Arizona which led to a record 645 heat related deaths. Heat waves in other parts of the world, where air conditioning is rare led to many more thousands of deaths. And again, if the trend of exponential growth in temperature continues those death figures will also grow exponentially.

I simply can’t imagine 113 straight days of over 100 degrees F (37.8 degrees C). And look at by how much it broke the old record of 76! Phoenix broke all kinds of heat records in 2024. (Credit: Fox Weather)

I’m going to end here, but the litany of extreme weather events is so large that I could go on and on. There is some good news, since the strong El Nino event that began in 2023 has now turned into a La Nina most climate models suggest that 2025 will not be as hot as either 2024 or 2023. Most experts expect this year to only be the third hottest year ever recorded. Of course that makes you wonder how bad the next El Nino will be when it comes.

Climatologists had hoped that 2025 would be a little bit cooler than 2024, it sure hasn’t started that way!!! (Credit: Facebook)

So long as we continue to burn fossil fuels the world will simply get hotter and hotter, that’s all there is to it.