The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a session about “extreme event attribution,” which is the ability to look at extreme weather events and determine the role of human-caused climate change in their impact. One of the experts on hand was researcher Michael Wehner at the Computational Research Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Asked to give an example of extreme event attribution in action, he pointed to 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas and Louisiana as a category 4 storm and caused 107 deaths.
“Global warming made the surface waters of the Gulf of Mexico about two degrees Fahrenheit warmer,” he explained, “increasing the rainfall during Hurricane Harvey by about 20%. This increased the area flooded by about 14%, importantly leading to a 32% increase in the number of flooded homes in Harris County. I estimate that global warming is then responsible for about a third of the $150 billion in damages estimated by NOAA during Hurricane Harvey.”
It was not just the damage itself, he said, but the fact that “these damages were not equally distributed across socioeconomic groups. Half of these flooded homes were in low-income Hispanic neighborhoods. As about a third of Harris County is characterized as low-income Hispanic, this disproportionate impact represented environmental justice, in my opinion.” He said evidence of similar environmental injustice can be seen in flooding in “New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania from the remnants of Hurricane Ida” in 2021.
