Photo courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard via Wikimedia Commons. Of the 2023 weather and climate disasters recently identified by the National OCeanic and Atmospheric Administration, the recent firestorms in Hawaii were identified as one of the costliest incidents.
By Sarah Grinnell ’26
Science and Environment Editor
What does climate change cost us? A new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that, for the United States, that number is $57.6 billion.
From flooding, tornadoes, heat waves and wildfires, 2023 has been fraught with climate calamities. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on Monday, Sept. 9, that the United States has now set the record for the most billion-dollar weather disasters to occur in a single year, USA Today reported.
According to Adam Smith, an applied climatologist at NOAA, the new report named 23 separate “weather and climate disasters” that cost at least $1 billion in damage. The 2023 disasters named by NOAA hold a combined total of more than $57.6 billion in damage and have resulted in the deaths of 253 people, Smith said in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. Among some of the costliest disasters Smith named were the decimating firestorms in Hawaii, Hurricane Idalia, hail storms in Minnesota and the “destructive tornadoes, severe hail and high wind” that occurred across parts of the Southern and Eastern United States.
However, these numbers are expected to climb even higher, as Smith added that the damages of Tropical Storm Hillary and the Southern/Midwestern drought are still being counted.
According to Smith, “the second half of each year is typically the costliest for the U.S., and hurricane, wildfire and drought costs mount,” so U.S. citizens can expect the totals to rise even higher before the year ends.
According to Smith, the United States has a higher “frequency and diversity” of billion-dollar weather events than any other country due to its “expansive geography that is prone to many hazards, trillions of dollars of assets in harm’s way, and the fact that climate change is amplifying the frequency and intensity of some of these extremes.”
The global rise of temperatures and the increase in extreme weather that comes with it leads to even more devastating consequences.
“The increase in extreme weather includes the rise in vulnerability to drought, lengthening wildfire seasons in the Western states, and the potential for extremely heavy rainfall becoming more common in the eastern states. Sea level rise is worsening hurricane storm surge flood potential,” Smith said.
According to USA Today, some southern states have felt the effects of these severe conditions in a particularly visceral way, with many of them having recorded record-high temperatures over the summer. The NOAA report showed that Texas, in particular, has had upwards of 100 billion-dollar weather events that impacted varying parts of the state, CBS News reported.
Texas native Amelia Anderson ’26 acknowledged that Texas summers are generally steamy but stressed that things have become more severe.
“This summer, in general, was so much hotter than even us Texans are used to. I remember as a kid, it often got up to 100 degrees, but it wasn't every day. This summer, the high was almost always above 100,” Anderson said.
According to Katherine Jacobs, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, “adding more energy to the atmosphere and the oceans will increase intensity and frequency of extreme events,” leading to weather that is “unusual and in some cases unprecedented.”
This has certainly been the case for Anderson, who said, “It has absolutely been hotter and drier than I've ever felt before. I fully believe this is a consequence of climate change — I've never experienced anything even remotely like this before.”
Irregular weather has not been limited only to the South. Evelyn Fleming ’26, who hails from Vermont, described the “widespread flooding” that occurred in Barre, where she was doing her summer internship.
“The entire main street flooded, and there were multiple landslides. Many shops had to close for a time, and there were huge rebuilding efforts,” she explained.
Like Anderson, Fleming emphasized the irregularity of this weather.
“We had hurricane Irene about ten years ago, but otherwise, this type of event is not usual for our state. It does feel like this is beginning to become more and more frequent. This flooding event is even worse than Irene,” Fleming said.
As such, many experts are stressing the urgency of the U.S. government adapting its disaster response to accommodate intensifying weather patterns.
"This kind of a dire situation is likely to happen year after year as climate change worsens," said Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist at the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program, in a Common Dreams article. “It's imperative that U.S. policymakers invest much more in getting out ahead of disasters before they strike rather than forcing communities to just pick up the pieces after the fact.”
This urgency to reform U.S. disaster response is also underpinned by the fact that, in August, Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell cautioned in a CBS article that FEMA's disaster fund could “dry up within weeks and delay the federal response to natural disasters.”
As such, former FEMA director Craig Fugate believes these disasters are accelerating at a rate that the U.S. government cannot keep up with unless significant changes are made, as he asserted in a Newsday article that “the climate has already changed and neither the built environment nor the response systems are keeping up with the change.”
While Fleming said that her state “typically responds well to these disasters, both on a governmental and on an individual level” with volunteers, flood surveying and federal funding, Anderson’s experience highlights the steep consequences of the U.S.’s lack of a systemized plan for handling weather calamities across the country.
“Nothing is being done for the sole reason that it benefits corporations — they get rich off of people constantly running their AC … It's absolutely ridiculous that we keep experiencing these intense highs and lows, and politicians refuse to do anything,” Anderson said.
Thus, the extremes of 2023 — with four months still to go — have left many U.S. citizens, like Anderson, fearing for the future of the places they call home.
“I'm scared that the South is very quickly turning into Death Valley,” Anderson said. “Texas can be a beautiful, incredible place, and I'm terrified it will become inhospitable.”
Since 2017, there have been 124 billion-dollar disasters resulting in at least 5,100 fatalities and surmounting more than $1 trillion in damage, Smith said. According to Cleetus in the Common Dreams article, so long as progress continues to stall on a federal level, this “deadly and expensive reality” of the climate crisis that the NOAA report has laid bare will only continue to be felt in dramatic and increasingly destructive ways unless politicians rise to the wake-up call.