Let’s anticipate the usual slugfest and try to move beyond it: if we don’t do more, climate change will kill us, or our children and grandchildren. The opposite position: We don’t know exactly what the future will look like. Gloomy forecasts are the result of panic and fuel more. A lot is already being done and we humans have already survived many catastrophes.
the Taking stock of the most financially devastating climate disasters of 2022, which the British aid organization Christian Aid has now submitted, shows us how expensive it is now and how expensive it is likely to become in the future if climate protection is postponed further. Hurricane Ian caused an estimated $100 billion in damage to the United States and Cuba in September. The floods in Pakistan caused $30 billion in economic damage, according to World Bank estimates. The list goes on with droughts and heatwaves in Europe, summer floods and droughts in China, floods in Australia and Storm Eunice, which also hit Germany in February.
At this point, the objection is justified that such catastrophes have happened before and that the proportion of man-made climate change is difficult to determine. However, attribution research shows how warming climate increases the likelihood of such weather-related disasters. We would be ill-advised to wait for 100 percent.
The facts, facts, dates of the year 2022 correspond to what relatively recently was dismissed as too gloomy and not sufficiently secured prognosis. There is no reason to doubt that the share of human-caused climate change in future disasters will continue to increase as emissions continue to rise.
None of this is a reason to go straight from climate doubt to climate fatalism. Let’s see it positively, as far as that is possible: Uncertain forecasts did not only become facts in 2022, a secure basis for action to push the climate protection project of the century forward with much more emphasis in 2023. The list of devastating climate catastrophes will also be updated this year. But we can determine how long it will be in the future.
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