Midwest Flood Costs: $8.5 Billion and Rising

The damage estimates are starting to roll in from the Midwest floods, and they’re staggering.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has put crop-related losses at around $7 billion -- and rising. Iowa alone accounts for more than half of that amount.

Add property damages of $1.5 billion to the total hit, and you arrive at a preliminary flood damage estimate of $8.5 billion.

That's a very low-ball number. And yet, it already puts the Midwest floods of ’08 at number two on the list of the most expensive non-hurricane flooding catastrophes in the US, ever. WunderBlog has that story.

Read it. And when you do, keep this in mind: Despite media neglect, global warming -- in part -- has caused the treacherous rains that have spawned those costly floods, as Climate Progress and many others have studiously catalogued.

The proof is in the science. So much so that even the White House has admitted the climate-flood connection in a new report by the administration's US Climate Science Program, published on June 19, 2008.

From the research team, courtesy of Bloomberg:

Elevated temperatures in recent decades already have led to more intense rainstorms in the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, said Thomas Karl, co-chairman of the report.

"The probability of heavy downpours is increasing, which leads to events like what we're seeing in the Midwest,'' said Karl.

Here's more to wipe away the doubt. According to WunderBlog, the type of floods that struck the Midwest twice in 15 years -- first in 1993 and now in 2008 -- are 500-year floods. Meaning: they’re the kinds of floods that one would expect to occur once every 500 years. Not twice in 15.

It seems rather improbable that two such huge floods should occur within such a short time span, raising the question of whether the floods were, in part, human-caused.

In fact, the UN's IPCC has observed that the frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most of the world's land areas from human-caused climate changes.

Those numbers are expected to climb over time. And so will the real costs of the Midwest floods.

Whatever the final, multi-billion price tag in Iowa and elsewhere, the point is the same. Those billions represent -- in part -- the toll of inaction on global warming.

Climate change unabated means more Midwestern-like floods, only worse and more often.

And that's the sad scenario in Washington today, one of business- and politics-as-usual, under which the costs of climate disasters to the US keep piling up, and up and up...

Why gamble?

True, there are up-front costs of solving climate, too. But the investments required to advance the Top 7 Climate Solutions will cost far, far, far less than any bill the nation is forced to pay from doing nothing at all.

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