2023 was hot, wet, dry and deadly

Since society’s brush with COVID-19, time seems to be moving faster and slower simultaneously. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Asking people to remember what happened a month or year ago is like asking a goldfish to do your taxes. Or me, to be honest.

Since it’s the year’s end, The Meltdown offers a quick review of some of the year’s most significant climate/weather events. But first…

We had record-breaking drought and flooding. Category 4 Hurricane Ian became the deadliest to hit Florida since 1935. We even had a November hurricane, the first in 37 years. Mississippi’s state capital, Jackson, had a water crisis that, by all accounts, continues. Remember the winter “bomb cyclone” that affected 200 million Americans and shut down power grids across the country? I don’t.

Overall, we had 18 disasters costing over $1 billion each. Hurricane Ian alone cost $113 billion. We racked up $165 billion in damages in collaboration with Mother Nature. But the good news is that the Inflation Reduction Act was signed, guiding $400 billion toward fighting climate change.

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Will you remember 2023?

While the total damage caused this year is less than half of 2022, we did have 25 weather/climate disasters that cost over $1 billion, beating 2020′s record of 22, according to records kept by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

We can all be relieved that we had a quieter Atlantic Hurricane season this year, thanks to El Niño – a periodic climate pattern characterized by warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Without getting into the science of it all, winds from El Niño either prevent storms from forming or blow the tops off developing hurricanes. Silver-linings! Kind of.

However, 25-billion-dollar disasters are still alarming because…