The economic costs of Hurricane Harvey attributable to climate change
By D. Frame, Michael F. Wehner, Ilan Noy, S. Rosier. Climatic Change, 2020
110 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Hurricane Harvey is one of the costliest tropical cyclones in history. In this paper, we use a probabilistic event attribution framework to estimate the costs associated with Hurricane Harvey that are attributable to anthropogenic influence on the climate system. Results indicate that the “fraction of attributable risk” for the rainfall from Harvey was likely about at least a third with a preferable/best estimate of three quarters. With an average estimate of damages from Harvey assessed at about US$90bn, applying this fraction gives a best estimate of US$67bn, with a likely lower bound of at least US$30bn, of these damages that are attributable to the human influence on climate. This “bottom-up” event-based estimate of climate change damages contrasts sharply with the more “top-down” approach using integrated assessment models (IAMs) or global macroeconometric estimates: one IAM estimates annual climate change damages in the USA to be in the region of US$21.3bn. While the two approaches are not easily comparable, it is noteworthy that our “bottom-up” results estimate that one single extreme weather event contributes more to climate change damages in the USA than an entire year by the “top-down” method. Given that the “top-down” approach, at best, parameterizes but does not resolve the effects of extreme weather events, our findings suggest that the “bottom-up” approach is a useful avenue to pursue in future attempts to refine estimates of climate change damages.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10515f18f34f2073b64478c76199cb7f8cf2a1e1
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atmospheric Science
In Global and Planetary Change
In Soil Science
- Ilan Noy
- S. Hochrainer
- Thomas K. J. McDermott
- Makena Coffman
- Tam Bang Vu
- Sam Fankhauser
- Rio Yonson
- J. Gröschl
Citations in the corpus
- Climate change attribution and the economic costs of extreme weather events: a study on damages from extreme rainfall and drought (2020, methodology): “This aspect of the research is further developed in the companion piece on Hurricane Harvey (Frame et al. 2020), where we argue that IAM-based estimates of the costs of anthropogenic climate change ignore a substantial contribution to the actual costs.”