Did merely six “climate change related events” cause $14 billion in health costs in the past decade?
That’s what the Natural Resources Defense Council says in its new study, “Six Climate Change–Related Events In The United States Accounted For About $14 Billion In Lost Lives And Health Costs.
The events were:
- US Ozone Air Pollution, 2000–02
- California Heat Wave, 2006
- Florida Hurricane Season, 2004
- West Nile Virus Outbreak In Louisiana, 2002
- Red River Flooding In North Dakota, 2009
- Southern California Wildfires, 2003
So if you assume that all losses are due to climate change and then multiply deaths by the EPA-per-life-valuation of $7.9 million, like the NRDC does, you get to $14 billion pretty quickly.
There is, however, no evidence that these or any other discrete weather events were caused by climate change, manmade or otherwise. But that would get in the way of the creation of another green factoid to be mindlessly parroted.
This is hilarious. I see that only two of those items mentioned (the hurricanes and the heat wave) are even weather events. And as I recall, it was environmentalists who are the root cause of the damaging wildfires. They refused to allow the natural process of small fires to clean out the brush, so that the fires became disasterously large after several years of scrub growing without limit.
Jason, no. The replacement value of earth is only about $200 quadrillion. Please don’t be silly.
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If that is it, then it definitely is not justifiable to spend $$ trillions on CCS/renewables/nuclear just to mitigate $1.56 billion/yr in losses. Lord Monckton was spot on. It is much less costly to simply adapt ASSUMING AGW is any issue at all.
does that mean if a meteor wiped out all of Humanity, it could be claimed it was a $55,300,000,000,000,000 loss? $7.9mm x 7 billion people.