On Wednesday, the Oklahoma Insurance Department estimated that insured losses incurred in the deadly tornado that tore through Moore, Oklahoma, could exceed two billion dollars. It’s a number so large that, alongside the too-real photographs and videos of devastation that have emerged over the past two days, it approaches abstraction. But it’s also part of a trend of increasingly expensive weather that climate scientists are documenting: the frequency of billion-dollar disasters in America is growing at an annual rate of 4.8 per cent.

The billion-dollar weather club, as tracked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, reads like a Weather Channel hall of infamy: Hurricane Irene, at an adjusted estimated cost of ten billion dollars; the Texas wildfires of 2011, at a billion dollars; and Hurricane Sandy and the yearlong drought of 2012, the costs of which have yet to be reported by NOAA but are sure to meet the threshold as well. In 2011 and 2012 alone, twenty-five weather disasters were estimated to cost over a billion dollars each. In the entirety of the nineteen-eighties, there were twenty.

All of the cost estimates are adjusted for inflation, but the increase in expense doesn’t necessarily mean weather disasters are getting more severe; it may just mean they’re getting more expensive. In 2012, a year in which the fewest tornadoes were recorded in a decade, six different tornado events caused over a billion dollars in damage. At least with these storms, then, the most significant problem may be that they are hitting cities and suburbs that are offering up more, and more expensive, targets.

Illustration by Larry Buchanan.