2023 has already been a year of record-breaking climate change-related impacts: endless days of extreme heat, nightmare wildfires, extensive flooding, and storms like Hurricane Idalia that many communities are struggling to recover from. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently released its updated summary of extreme weather and climate change-related disasters. From January to August of this year, NOAA reports that the country experienced 23 disasters that each caused damages of at least $1 billion or more. These disasters had a total economic toll of $57.6 billion and contributed to 253 deaths. With two and half months left in the official Atlantic hurricane season (June 1 through November 30), we’ve already surpassed the total number of billion-dollar disasters for 2022. It’s another extreme weather record for 2023 that we really didn’t…
Read the full article originally published at blog.ucsusa.org.