The global impact of climate change on extreme events

This paper quantifies the global impact of climate change from several extreme events: local storms, heat waves, cold spells, floods, and droughts. The paper links climate scenarios to the ultimate damage from each event. An international regression suggests that damage increases with both income and population. The elasticity is unitary for thunderstorms and heat waves but is less than unitary for the other extreme events. Using global projections of future income and population, the analysis calculates that baseline damage from these five extreme events without climate change will increase from their current level of $28 to $113 billion a year in 2100. Baseline deaths are expected to fall from 13,400 to 10,500 by 2100. Given empirical evidence about the link between climate and damages, climate change is calculated to increase the damages from these five extreme events by between $11 and $16 billion a year by 2100. There is little supporting evidence that climate affects deaths from these events (except for the possibility of local storm deaths increasing). Summing the damages in this report with tropical cyclone and severe storm damages from the literature suggests that climate change may increase the overall damage from extreme events by $84 billion or 0.015 percent of world GDP.