Hurricanes Wreak Economic Havoc as World Warms

Climate change could already be costing the US billions of dollars each year in hurricane damage alone.

Economists from Mexico and Europe believe that somewhere between $2bn and $14bn of the financial costs of hurricane damage in 2005 could be attributed to the impact of global warming.

This is a bold statement.  But Francisco Estrada, an environmental economics researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and European colleagues report in Nature Geoscience that they have looked at the pattern of economic losses from hurricanes that matches a rise between 1990 and 2005 in the number and intensity of tropical cyclones.

They say that this upward trend in loss “cannot be explained by commonly-used socioeconomic variables”.

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