The agency added that humans are playing a role in fueling rising temperatures and a shifting climate. | Getty CBO warns of climate change's budget impact

The Congressional Budget Office is warning lawmakers about the fiscal risks of climate change, putting the studiously non-partisan agency at odds with Republican Party orthodoxy.

The report, released as hurricane season begins, warns that hurricane damage will “increase significantly in the coming decades” due to climate change. The agency added that humans are playing a role in fueling rising temperatures and a shifting climate.


“Human activities around the world — primarily the burning of fossil fuels and widespread changes in land use — are producing growing emissions of greenhouse gases,” the report states. “Experts in the scientific community have concluded that a portion of those emissions are absorbed by the oceans, but a substantial fraction persists in the atmosphere for centuries, trapping heat and warming the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Most Republicans remain unconvinced that climate change is real, with the party’s presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, calling it “a total hoax” and “pseudoscience.” His previous rival for the nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, has called climate change a “pseudo-scientific theory.” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has said the science is inconclusive. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) famously threw a snowball on the Senate floor in February 2015 to argue that climate change is not real. He also wrote a book, titled “The Greatest Hoax,” which called the widely accepted scientific facts around climate change a “conspiracy.” Republicans have repeatedly sought to block President Barack Obama’s domestic and global efforts to curb climate change.

The CBO report included possible policies that Congress might enact to mitigate the rising costs of increased hurricane damage. Among those was a “coordinated effort to significantly reduce global emissions.” The agency also acknowledged that international action is needed, as U.S. emissions are trending downward as a share of the global total.

CBO noted that climate change contributes to more hurricane damage in two ways: rising sea levels and an increase in the frequency of hurricanes.

By 2075, annual federal spending resulting from hurricane damage could account for as much as 0.25 percent of GDP, up from 0.16 percent of GDP today. The federal government has spent $209 billion in discretionary spending to address hurricane damage since 2000. About 75 percent of that was dedicated to two storms: Hurricane Katrina, which slammed the Gulf Coast in 2005, and Hurricane Sandy, which hit the northeast in 2012.