Citizens Addressing our Changing Climate: A climate disaster hits home

The June installment of this series asked “Why Care About Climate Disasters?”

It described the effects of unusually severe spring wildfires in northeastern Minnesota and the unhealthy local air quality due to smoke from fires in central Canada (local air quality alerts continue).

Readers were asked to consider the hardship caused by severe weather near and far and reasons why the suffering of others warrants our concern.

I shared my own reasons for heightened concern because friends and family were victims of some of the worst climate disasters the U.S. has suffered in recent years: the devastation of Lahaina, Hawaii, due to wildfire in August of 2023, the Pacific Palisades, Calif., fire last January and the flooding around Asheville, N.C., extending from Hurricane Helene.

Climate science demonstrates that we are tilting the odds that these extreme events will keep worsening in both intensity and frequency. So, the chances were that the summer would unfold with more horrifying stories of climate disasters.

Since June, hundreds died in flash floods caused by record rainfall in Kerr County, Texas. The drownings of dozens of children at summer camp tear at our heart strings. Official reports list more than a hundred still missing.

Less U.S. media attention was paid to the thousands who died due to the unprecedented heatwave in Europe — more than 1,000 deaths in Spain alone.

Thankfully no deaths have been attributed to the historic storm that hit Bemidji in the early morning of June 21, but our community has suffered immense loss. We experienced first-hand the destructive force of 100-plus mile-per-hour winds.

We are far from hurricane country so, under normal climate conditions, Category 3 Hurricane-force winds would not be in the cards.

While climate science is improving dramatically, the state-of-the-art does not support conclusions that specific extreme weather events were caused by climate change. But greenhouse-gas pollution (primarily carbon emissions) is stacking the deck so the odds increase that storms like the one that hit Bemidji will get even more severe and occur more often in more places.

Scientific evidence that is emerging is in the form of probabilities that weather events become more severe. An analysis of the Pacific Palisades fire concludes that extended drought and gale-force winds that caused the devastating inferno were a third more likely due to climate change.

A study of the recent European heat wave estimates that over a thousand fewer deaths would have occurred if it hadn’t been supercharged by climate change.

In Bemidji, trees that withstood our weather for more than a century were blown flat like a house of cards. Science labels weather extremes with terms like 1,000-year storms. Maybe that’s what hit us.

But an important way of understanding the threat of climate change is that 1,000-year storms are happening much more frequently than the label implies.

Studies of rainfall amounts and flooding show that 100-year floods based on past patterns are now occurring about every 25 years. Fifty-year floods tend to cause less loss of life but are still very destructive.

The emerging climate crisis means those odds are now four-to-five times more likely: happening about every decade. These relationships are depicted in what hydrologists call hydrographs and the ones for Minnesota rivers show worsening extremes, both in high and low water levels, and in how often these extremes occur.

Economists have been tracking evidence for decades about the worsening losses due to climate change. Analysis includes estimates of damages to infrastructure, property and natural resources.

But it is problematic to attach dollar values to the loss of life. Some climate models forecast millions of additional weather-related deaths globally over the coming decades.

The economics literature has been warning for years that the insurance industry would be stressed to the limits by increasing damages from climate change.

To stay in business, insurance companies must tie premiums to expected losses, so the worsening odds are reflected in higher insurance costs for us and restrictions in coverage or denial of policies in high-risk areas.

Another source of economic evidence is the increasing expenditures on emergency management and disaster relief at local, state and national levels due to climate change.

Bemidji State researchers participated in a multi-disciplinary, multi-university study for the State of Minnesota on the impacts of climate change on our state’s surface waters.

One of the topics BSU focused on was the link between the worsening hydrographs mentioned above and the associated economic damages. An important finding was that previously defined 100-year and 50-year floods were occurring so much more often that damages, especially to roads and bridges, were increasing by hundreds of millions of dollars.

These costs of replacing washed out roads, culverts and bridges ultimately hit us as taxpayers. The financial losses we bear, much like insurance costs, provide further reason to care about damages from climate change.

Our community is facing a heavy burden as we recover from the June 21 storm. We now know more than most people about the destructive potential of severe weather. Having experienced it, we can hope it won’t happen again, here or elsewhere.

But the trends are worsening. The destruction around us gives us a glimpse into why economic analysis shows that reducing climate pollution will cost us less in the long run than failing to address the problem.

Pat Welle is a member of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby organization. For more information, visit CitizensClimateLobby.org.