By Adrien Salazar and Algernon Austin

Climate change means that the extreme weather events we are witnessing, like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and the heatwave that this week swept California, will be more common and more intense. The level of flooding that Harvey has caused in Houston has traditionally been expected once every 500 years, but in fact “500-year floods” have happened 3 times in Houston in the last 3 years.

The Washington Post suggested that 2016 be called “the year of the flood.” Harvey alone has made 2017 the new “year of the flood,” and Hurricane Irma, as of this writing bringing Category 5 winds across the Caribbean, is projected to make landfall in Florida by the end of the week. The Post also noted that 2016 was an intense year for droughts and forest fires around the country. The future promises more natural disasters aggravated by climate change as a result of inaction by those in power who deny climate reality.

In June, the New York Times produced an important map showing the predicted economic impact of climate change on counties across the United States. The map shows that counties in the southern states, from North Carolina across to California and southward, would carry the greatest economic costs of climate change. Many of the counties in these states could lose 5 to 15 percent of GDP per year, with the poorest counties suffering some of the largest declines.