Image: Lakeway City Park on Lake Travis, 2011 Drought of Record, elevation approximately 630. The elevation for February 2024 was 631.34.
2023’s Heat Cost Texas $24 Billion
First published at the Dallas Federal Reserve by Jayashankar et al., on October 18, 2023
Note: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Billion Dollar Weather Events accounting seems to understate. The heat and drought in four southern and southwestern states in 2023 ranked $14.5 billion, while the Dallas Federal Reserve quotes $24 billion for Texas alone. The same thing happened with $300 billion in damages for Winter Storm Uri in Texas in 2021. NOAA lists this event as $24.0 billion, with 226 deaths, while the Texas Comptroller said $133 billion and Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers said $300 billion. An independent excess deaths analysis by Buzz Feed said 978 died in just the 7-days of the storm. I spoke with NOAA about this before the 2021 numbers were final and they said they were working on it. After the final numbers came out I wrote again and received no reply. A good piece of science to study to learn more about how we understate impacts of climate change is:
University College London, Commentary
Kikstra et al., The social cost of carbon dioxide under climate-economy feedbacks and temperature variability, Environmental Research Letters, September 9 , 2021.
Melton
(Excerpt)
Analyses drawing on data from 2000–22 indicate Texas is especially vulnerable to hotter summers. For every 1-degree increase in average summer temperature, Texas annual nominal GDP growth slows 0.4 percentage points.
With this year’s summer temperatures 2.5 degrees above the post-2000 average, estimates for Texas suggest, all else equal, the summer heat could have reduced annual nominal GDP growth by 1 percentage point for 2023, or about $24 billion. Other calculations suggest a somewhat lesser impact of nearly $10 billion in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP, about 0.5 percent of annual output.
The impact of an increase in summer temperatures on Texas GDP growth is twice as pronounced as the change in the rest of the U.S. because summers are generally hotter relative to the rest of the country. At the same time, the effect of rising summer temperatures on job growth is more subtle, though the effects vary widely across sectors. As climate change’s effects intensify over the next decade, heat waves will become more commonplace and severe, and Texans will need to adapt.