Climate change is costing the economy—whether climate-deniers admit it or not

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If you’re a climate-change denier in the eastern US, including the president, then the past few weeks have been a dream. It’s cold and snowy where I live, you might say, colder and snowier than in years.

Therefore, climate change is a hoax, just as I’m always saying. Would I be able to hold this snowball otherwise? Check and mate. Unfortunately, extreme spells of winter weather can still happen in an atmosphere made more chaotic by rising heat.

The fact that a record-smashing summer heat wave is happening in Australia at the same time that a brutal winter cold is punishing the US illustrates the point. And all these weather extremes endanger people and make them poorer, costs that will keep mounting the more we waste time pretending the problem doesn’t exist or hoping half-measures will suffice. It’s no coincidence that, as temperatures have risen in this century, so has the damage from climate-fueled weather.

The world has spent $20 trillion in the past 25 years cleaning up and insuring property after disasters, Bloomberg Intelligence estimates. That includes $1.4 trillion last year, a rare and merciful dip from 2024’s record $1.6 trillion, thanks in part to the US avoiding landfall from a hurricane for the first time in a decade. Those costs include not only hurricanes, floods and wildfires, but also deep freezes and winter storms.

As you might expect, the latter two events don’t seem to have increased in frequency as the planet has become hotter. But they haven’t gone away. For the past 40 years in the US, there have more or less consistently been one or two winter storms or freezes or both each year that are strong enough to inflict at least $1 billion in damage, according to the