An “extreme heat belt” that stretches across the center of the US is expected to emerge over the next 30 years, subjecting millions more Americans to dangerously hot days. That’s according to new research published today by the nonprofit research group First Street Foundation.

The belt is expected to extend from Texas and Louisiana all the way up to Wisconsin. Along the belt, extremely hot days could feel brutal, reaching temperatures that feel hotter than 125 degrees Fahrenheit.

About 107.6 million Americans across 1,023 counties will experience that level of extreme heat at least one day a year by 2053. That’s compared to just 8.1 million residents in 50 counties who can expect to suffer through such high temperatures in 2023, according to First Street’s analysis.

“We need to be prepared for the inevitable, that a quarter of the country will soon fall inside the Extreme Heat Belt with temperatures exceeding 125°F and the results will be dire,” Matthew Eby, founder and CEO of First Street Foundation, said in a press release.

That figure, 125 degrees, is a measure of heat and humidity called a heat index. It’s often referred to as what the temperature “feels like.” Anything 125 degrees Fahrenheit or higher falls into the National Weather Service’s highest heat index category — signaling “extreme danger” when heat stroke is “highly likely.”

Image: First Street Foundation

Even if you don’t live within that extreme heat belt, you can expect temperatures to rise higher than what your community has experienced in the past, the research warns. “Virtually the entire country is subject to increasing perils associated with heat exposure,” the report says. That’s no surprise, of course — climate change is pushing the weather to extremes across the world.

What’s cool about this new research is that you can zoom in to see the changes that your home might have to adapt to in the future. Just plug your address into Fist Street’s “Risk Factor” search tool online. That’ll pull up information on how many more hot days the location is expected to experience in 30 years. I searched for my childhood home in Southern California and found that it might see 11 days a year with a heat index above 99 degrees Fahrenheit compared to just four days this year. (You’ll also see wildfire and flood risk when you search for an address on the Risk Factor tool.)

To figure out how much each location will bake in the future, the researchers first looked at the heat index for the seven hottest days it experienced this year. Then, using federal government datasets and other publicly available resources, it built a model to estimate how often the location would experience days that hot three decades from now.

Miami-Dade County in Florida is on track to experience the biggest increase in the frequency of its hottest days. Currently, the heat index here reaches 103 degrees Fahrenheit during the seven hottest days of the year. By 2053, more than 30 days a year would feel that hot, according to First Street’s research.

Hurricane season in the Atlantic is arriving ahead of schedule as the oceans warm, a new study finds. Big storms in the North Atlantic are forming earlier in the year than they used to, and forecasters say this means coastal communities need to be on the alert sooner, too.

Tropical storms that reach a certain strength are named by the World Meteorological Organization. And the first named storms to develop each year have come about five days earlier each decade since 1979, according to the study published today in the journal Nature Communications. Named storms that make landfall in the US, meanwhile, have shown up about two days earlier every decade since 1900.

That means communities that frequently find themselves in the path of those storms might need to prepare for hurricane season earlier than they have in the past. And officials might want to rethink the timeframe they’ve established for the Atlantic hurricane season, which has officially started on June 1st every year since 1965.

“As a hurricane forecaster, in the late 20-teens, I noticed that there’s a very unusual preponderance of storms developing before the start of hurricane season,” says Ryan Truchelut, lead author of the new study. Truchelut co-authored the paper and co-founded the forecasting company WeatherTiger with his wife, physicist Erica Staehling.

The authors of the new study based their research on storm development on observational data from 1979 to 2020. They were limited to studying those four decades because that’s about how long satellites have been around to help forecasters see more storms develop. They felt that including earlier years might have led to a biased assessment of seasonal trends over time.

In the past, it’s been difficult for researchers to work with such limited data to establish a connection between warming temperatures and a longer hurricane season. But the past decade has been pretty remarkable for forecasters to watch. The seventh consecutive year in a row that a named storm formed before June 1st was 2021.

Higher sea surface temperatures are likely the driving force behind that unusually early tropical storm activity, Truchelut and his co-authors found. Those higher temperatures have been strongly tied to climate change, and hurricanes gain strength in warmer waters.

Temperatures in May typically aren’t warm enough to churn up major hurricanes. But the public still ought to take precautions for earlier storms even if they’re weaker, Truchelut warns. Heavy rains from those storms can pose a significant threat, even if the storm’s wind speeds don’t surpass the necessary threshold (111 miles per hour) to be considered a major hurricane.

The National Weather Service (NWS) is already considering whether to move the first official day of the Atlantic hurricane season up to May 15th instead of June 1st. And even though the date hasn’t officially moved, some hurricane forecasting efforts have already shifted. Last year, the National Hurricane Center decided to start issuing Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlooks on May 15th. Those are routine forecasts that typically don’t come out until June.

Besides, “hurricane season does not have a rigorous scientific definition,” Truchelut tells The Verge. “It’s purely a social construct.” In 1935, the US Weather Bureau, the predecessor to the NWS, designated hurricane season for the Atlantic basin as June 15th through November 15th. In 1965, the dates shifted to June 1st to November 30th to encompass 97 percent of storm activity in the region.

Summer nights are getting increasingly dangerous thanks to climate change. By 2100, the risk of death from excessively hot nights is expected to grow six-fold compared to 2016 — even under the most optimistic predictions of future global warming, according to a new study published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health.

Hot nights are becoming both more frequent and way more intense, the study authors found. We don’t know just how much the planet will heat up in the future, but scientists have estimates for best- and worst-case scenarios. When looking at a more middle-of-the-road forecast for future climate change, hot nights become 75.6 percent more frequent by the end of the century. The average intensity of a sweltering night doubles — from 20.4 degrees Celsius (68.7 degrees Fahrenheit) to 39.7 degrees Celsius (103.5 degrees Fahrenheit).

An international collaboration of scientists used historical data from 1981 to 2010 and applied that to climate models to estimate future mortality risk, looking specifically at 28 cities in East Asia. They’re working on expanding their research to a global dataset.

While hot days are already brutal for people, the risk of mortality rises by up to 50 percent if temperatures stay high into the evening. Hot days stress out the body, straining the heart and lungs, and nighttime is usually when our bodies can bring our core temperature down while sleeping. That’s harder to do if it’s still uncomfortably hot and you’re tossing and turning during the night. Heat stress can lead to heatstroke, which can eventually lead to death. Lost sleep can also weaken our immune systems, affect mental health, and aggravate a wide range of health conditions.

Places with historically milder temperatures can be at greater risk. Often, these places aren’t built with extremely hot temperatures in mind. People might not have air conditioning, for instance. That’s especially been a problem for the UK as it suffers through record-smashing heat spells this summer. The UK had its warmest night ever in July, according to provisional numbers from the Met Office. That heatwave might have killed 948 people in England and Wales, according to one preliminary analysis.

Until now, “the risks of increasing temperature at night were frequently neglected,” Yuqiang Zhang, a co-author of the new study and a climate scientist at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, said in a press release.

That needs to change. Officials often warn people to take precautions during scorching hot days. But warning systems also need to be designed to address nighttime risks, Zhang said, “especially for vulnerable populations and low-income communities who may not be able to afford the additional expense of air conditioning.” While heat poses serious health risks, deaths are largely avoidable if people take the threat seriously, check in with each other, and find safe ways to stay cool.

The US’s largest water reservoir, Lake Mead at the Hoover Dam, is in very, very bad shape. How bad is it? New satellite images from NASA show just how much the reservoir’s footprint has shrunk over the past two decades — and the difference between July 2000 and July 2022 is stark.

Water levels at Lake Mead are at a historic low — the reservoir hasn’t been this empty since 1937 when it was being filled for the first time. It’s currently at just 27 percent capacity. The last time it was close to full capacity was 1999, just one year before the image on the left of the slider below was taken.

The water elevation at the Hoover Dam stood at a meager 1,041 feet on July 18th, 2022, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages Lake Mead. That’s a scary number because, once it drops below 1,000 feet, it will affect the dam’s ability to operate its hydropower turbines. The dam typically provides power to 1.3 million people in Nevada, Arizona, and California.

That’s not the only trouble at Lake Mead. Last year, officials declared a water shortage there — the first time such a declaration had ever been made along the Colorado River system. Forty million people depend on the system for water across the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico. At the time, water levels at Lake Mead had dropped to 1,071.57 feet. The water elevation is already even lower than that and is predicted to drop another 20 feet by next summer.

Long-term drought made worse by climate change has sucked the reservoir dry. In the chart below, NASA plots out what that’s looked like over the past 2022 years. More than 80 percent of the Western US is currently “abnormally dry,” according to the US Drought Monitor. Well over a third of the region is coping with “extreme” or “exceptional” drought.

Image: NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

Vanishing water at Lake Mead has left behind what’s euphemistically called a “bathtub ring.” You can see it pretty well in the images below that zoom in on one section of the reservoir. The pale fringes surrounding the water that remains are places where water left behind calcium carbonate and other minerals — showing where the high mark used to be.

Image: NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

The receding water is uncovering the reservoir’s secrets — sparking treasure hunts and even murder mysteries. A body found in a barrel this year is suspected to be the victim of a mob hit in the 1980s, The Washington Post reports. (Las Vegas is nearby.) Tourists have also started scouring the lake in search of jewelry and other valuables, the Post reports. That’s only if they can manage to get on the water — five of six boating ramps are closed and cars are reportedly getting stuck in the mud along the lake’s shrinking shores.

As extreme heat stifles communities around the world this week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said that it has “no immediate plans” to give heatwaves names. The July 19th announcement seems to pump the brakes on growing calls to come up with a strategy for ranking and naming heatwaves around the world.

In the US, heat kills more people than any other weather-related disaster. Globally, it kills 5 million people a year. But heat spells haven’t always spurred the same careful preparations people might take to, say, shelter from a major storm. The goal of naming heatwaves would be to make it easier to communicate the risks they pose to the public so that people can take measures to stay safe.

For decades, names have played a big role in early warnings for dangerous storms. Warning people about hurricane “Sandy” or “Harvey” just became a lot easier than identifying a storm by latitude and longitude. The US’s National Hurricane Center started giving Atlantic storms monikers from an official list in 1953. Currently, the WMO maintains rotating lists of names for the Atlantic and other regions.

Some advocates want to apply a similar naming mechanism to heatwaves. Seville, Spain, is set to become the first city in the world to test out the idea later this year. Officials in Athens, Greece, and California have contemplated doing the same. But the WMO apparently has some reservations, saying that it’s “currently considering the advantages and disadvantages of naming heatwaves.”

“What has been established for tropical cyclone events may not necessarily translate easily across to heatwaves,” the WMO said in its news release this week. “Caution should be exercised when comparing or applying lessons or protocols from one hazard type to another, due to the important differences in the physical nature and impacts of storms and heatwaves.”

“False alarms” are one concern for the WMO. Heatwaves can be forecast up to 10 days out in many parts of the world. But if the forecast for an extreme heatwave is inaccurate — maybe it’s not as hot as expected or it hits a different region than anticipated — then people might lose faith in the warnings and stop heeding them.

The other caveat with heat, the WMO says, is that heat-related deaths can happen even when it’s not extraordinarily hot outside. If someone is continuously exposed to more sweltering conditions, say, in the workplace or in a home without air conditioning, they can become ill even if there isn’t an officially declared heatwave.

To prevent confusion ahead of a potential disaster, the WMO also says that any “pilot heatwave naming” should at least be tied into a country’s official warning system in the absence of a broader international framework.

Seville is piloting a project this year that will test a new alert system to warn residents ahead of a heatwave. Extreme heat events will be categorized based on their severity, and those forecast to have the greatest impact on the city will get a name. The first five have already been chosen: Zoe, Yago, Xenia, Wenceslao, and Vega.

“We are the first city in the world to take a step that will help us plan and take measures when this type of meteorological event happens—particularly because heat waves always hit the most vulnerable,” Antonio Muñoz, the mayor of Seville, said in a June 21st press release.

Parts of Europe literally buckled and burned under a brutal heatwave this week — even in places with typically milder summers. In the UK, record-breaking temperatures buckled train tracks and even an airport runway. London’s fire service responded to more blazes in a day than it had since World War II, according to Sadiq Khan, the city’s mayor. And 100 million people in the US are under heat alerts today.

Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and more intense as greenhouse gas emissions heat our planet. More than a third of heat deaths can be attributed to climate change, according to research published last year.

The UK recorded temperatures rising above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time in its 350 years of climate records. The searing heatwave is unprecedented in a country that’s used to much cooler summer weather and is a bellwether of more extremes to come.

The heat is so bad that it’s buckled an airport runway, forcing London Luton Airport to temporarily suspend flights on Monday. Rail services across parts of the UK ground to a halt as tracks also buckled or overheated, and overhead cables failed and even caught on fire. Over 48 hours, England and Wales grappled with twice as many wildfires as it did throughout the entire month of July last year. Parched grass turned to tinder, sparking blazes that threatened homes around London today.

The UK’s very first “Red Extreme” heat warning kicked in for parts of England yesterday, and temperatures soared even higher today. A scorching 40.2 Celsius was recorded at Heathrow airport near London at 12:50 and was soon beat by a temperature reading of 40.3 degrees Celsius some 225 km (140 miles) further north in Coningsby. Those numbers still have to be verified, but the UK says at least 29 places have documented temperatures breaking the UK’s previous record high of 38.7 C set in 2019.

The heat was so extreme that broadcaster Sky News literally turned into sky news, putting together a 10-plus-hour livestream of the Sun as it made its way across the sky.

Some relief is on the way, in the form of thunderstorms rolling through parts of the UK today and tomorrow. As the week winds down, the Met Office expects cooler air to bring temperatures down “closer to normal” for this time of year. In London, that means temperatures in the 20s. (That’s 70s to low 80s Fahrenheit for American readers).

Still, the effects of this week’s brutal heatwave are warning of how many places — including typically cooler regions like the UK — will have to adapt to a warming climate. “Here in the UK, we’re used to treating a hot spell as a chance to go and play in the sun. This is not that sort of weather,” Penny Endersby, chief executive of the Met Office, said in a recorded video message last week. “Our lifestyles and our infrastructure are not adapted to what is coming.”

Other parts of the world are also sweltering. Record-breaking temperatures are forecast for the Central US this week, placing tens of millions of people under heat alerts. More than 1,100 people have already died from the heat in Spain and Portugal in the past week. Spain, Portugal, and France have all grappled with out-of-control wildfires during the extreme heat.

From space, a European weather satellite was able to capture a rare, nearly cloudless picture of almost all of the continent on Monday as the sun beat down on residents without much filter.

For the first time on record, parts of the UK are sweltering in temperatures that could soon reach 40 degrees Celsius (that’s over 104 degrees Fahrenheit for American readers). It’s the first time those temperatures have ever been forecast in the UK, according to the Met Office, which also issued its first-ever “Red Extreme” heat warning for parts of England. The warning kicked in today and lasts through tomorrow.

The level of risk the UK now faces from extreme heat is unprecedented. But this isn’t a one-off event. The nation is going to have to brace for dangerous heat much more often, forecasters warn.

“We hoped we wouldn’t get to this situation,” Met Office climate attribution scientist Nikos Christidis said in a press release on Friday. “Climate change has already influenced the likelihood of temperature extremes in the UK.”

As a result, 40-degree days in the UK are now as much as 10 times more likely than they would be “under a natural climate unaffected by human influence,” according to Christidis. The current record high temperature in the UK is 38.7°C, which was recorded relatively recently in 2019 at the Cambridge Botanic Garden.

This kind of heat is increasingly putting peoples’ lives at risk. The UK Health Security Agency issued its highest alert for heat health this week, warning that “illness and death may occur among the fit and healthy, and not just in high-risk groups.”

France, Spain, and Portugal are grappling with extreme heat this week, too — which is fueling raging wildfires in parts of Europe. But a typically cooler region like the UK might have even more to do to adapt to a different kind of climate.

Last week, officials started warning people to prepare for the heat. “It can be difficult for people to make the best decisions in these situations because nothing in their life experience has led them to know what to expect,” Penny Endersby, chief executive of the Met Office, said in a recorded video message. “Here in the UK, we’re used to treating a hot spell as a chance to go and play in the sun. This is not that sort of weather. Our lifestyles and our infrastructure are not adapted to what is coming.”

The weather in London around this time of year has historically averaged high temperatures at a balmy 23 degrees Celsius (74 degrees Fahrenheit). That helps explain why it’s estimated that less than 5 percent of homes in England have air conditioning.

“It is time for the UK to stop thinking of itself only as a cold country, where any bout of summer sunshine is celebrated as an opportunity for beach visits and ice creams,” Bob Ward, the policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said to The Guardian. “We must adapt and do a better job of protecting ourselves, particularly those who are most vulnerable to hot weather.”

While 40-degree weather has been unheard of in the UK until now, the Met Office is already warning about even higher temperatures to come. A summer season with more than one day that rises above 40 degrees Celsius is still a rarity in the UK — something that typically only happens every 100 to 300 years now, according to the Met Office. But by 2100 — likely within the lifetime of many children today — a summer that scorching hot could come around every 15 years.

After two years of Fourth of July celebrations without fireworks during the COVID-19 pandemic, the California resort community of North Lake Tahoe is ready to light up the sky again. But instead of traditional fireworks, more than 100 drones will take off for a light show choreographed to music. Like an increasing number of communities throughout the region, city planners chose fire safety and sustainability over nostalgia as California copes with a cruel megadrought.

“Fireworks come with their own list of known environmental impacts—including noise pollution, impacts to the lake, and increased risk of fire at a time when the wildfire risk is already so high,” Katie Biggers, executive director of the Tahoe City Downtown Association, said in a press release earlier this year announcing the decision.

The entirety of Placer County, where the North Lake Tahoe drone show will take place, is dealing with severe drought conditions — with a third of the county facing “extreme drought,” according to the US drought monitor.

Those bone-dry conditions, made worse by sweltering heat and, you guessed it — climate change, turn landscapes into tinderboxes. Dry vegetation sets the stage for wildfires to burn out of control. All it needs is a spark, and firework shows have plenty of those.

Fire departments in the US responded to an estimated 19,500 calls for blazes sparked by fireworks in 2018 alone, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Those fires injured 46 people, killed five, and cost $105 million in property damage.

So it’s not really a surprise that communities across the increasingly fire-prone western US are starting to turn to less risky drone shows. This year, alongside North Lake Tahoe, this includes Galveston, Texas and Lakewood, Colorado, among others. In recent years, drones have made more appearances at other big bashes: the opening ceremony for the 2018 Winter Olympics, the 2017 Super Bowl halftime show, Drake’s 2018 summer tour, to name a few of many.

Demand for drone shows this year is “exponentially larger than last year,” Graham Hill, founder and CEO of drone show company Hire UAV Pro, told Axios. “If we’re tracking the evolution of this, I just don’t think most communities knew this was a viable option last year.”

Cost can be a barrier for small towns interested in a less flammable option. The Tahoe City Downtown Association asked for donations from local organizations and residents to fund the drone show, which it said cost “significantly more” than fireworks. The bill for a drone show can add up to $25,000 or more compared to $2,000 for a small fireworks show, according to Axios.

And even in the fire-prone west, some communities are sticking with tradition. Nearby South Lake Tahoe is having a fireworks show this year after narrowly surviving the Caldor fire that raged from August to October last year.

Forecasters expect a busy 2022 Atlantic hurricane season, with a 65 percent chance of an above-average season. There’s also a wildcard in the mix that raises the risk of more severe storms in the Gulf of Mexico this year.

Between 14 to 21 tropical storms could grow powerful enough to be named this season, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in its season outlook briefing, which was released today. The average Atlantic hurricane season, which starts on June 1st, typically has about 14 named storms. Another prominent forecast from Colorado State University predicted 19 named storms this year.

NOAA expects six to 10 storms to strengthen into hurricanes. NOAA also forecast between three to six major hurricanes, ranked as a Category 3 or higher with wind speeds of at least 111 miles per hour.

There’s also a troubling development in the Gulf of Mexico. The Loop Current, a current of warm water, has moved surprisingly far north for this time of year. The current, which flows like a river within the sea, brings warmer water from the Caribbean to typically cooler waters closer to the US Gulf Coast. That’s especially worrying news for the season since hurricanes feed off heat energy.

“It’s higher octane fuel,” says University of Miami oceanography professor Nick Shay. “It’s the 800 pound gorilla in the Gulf.”

Shay is concerned that the Loop Current’s current behavior looks similar to the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane season — when hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma ripped through Gulf Coast communities.

“In 2005, we have what is known as the hurricane Trifecta in the Gulf of Mexico,” Shay says. Both Katrina and Rita developed explosively into Category 5 storms after crossing paths with the Loop Current’s warmer waters. Hurricanes Ida in 2021 and Harvey in 2017 were also strengthened by the Loop Current.

The Loop Current’s water is also saltier. Differences in temperature and salinity between the Loop Current and the rest of the Gulf limit ocean water mixing, which might normally bring surface temperatures down.

As a result, the current holds onto heat at much deeper depths than the surrounding Gulf. Water temperatures of 78 degrees Fahrenheit in the current can reach up to 500 feet below the surface. Outside of the current, those kinds of temperatures usually only reach 100 feet below the surface. “It’s a big difference,” Shay says.

But Shay cautions that it’s too soon to tell whether something similar to 2005 could happen this season. It will depend on whether any storms move toward the Loop Current (or toward large circling pools of hot water that spin off from the current, called eddies). Whether the Loop Current can successfully supercharge storms will also depend on whether storms form during favorable atmospheric conditions and low wind shear.

Strong wind sheer, changes in the wind’s speed and direction, can destabilize or weaken a storm. But a weather pattern called La Niña is expected to keep wind shear low throughout the hurricane season, a factor that could up the chances of stronger storms developing.

NOAA also pointed to an “enhanced” west African monsoon affecting this year’s Atlantic season. The west African monsoon, a major wind system, can drive stronger easterly waves that “seed many of the strongest and longest lived hurricanes during most seasons,” NOAA says in its season outlook.

Stronger hurricanes are expected to become more common as climate change heats up the world’s oceans. Warmer than average sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea are also likely to boost hurricane activity this season, NOAA said today.

There’s also evidence that hurricanes have begun to intensify more quickly and keep their strength for longer after making landfall as global average temperatures rise. The Loop Current’s warm eddies also seem to hold more heat than they have in the past, Shay says, although scientists can’t yet pinpoint why.

Should NOAA’s predictions for 2022 come true, it would be the seventh consecutive above-normal season for the Atlantic.

More than half of all homes, 56 percent, in the contiguous 48 states face at least some wildfire risk in the next few decades, according to a first-of-its-kind report published today by the nonprofit research organization First Street Foundation.

First Street gave each address in the continental US a rating between one to 10, with one representing close to no risk and 10 representing a 36 percent or more likelihood that a property could be caught up in a wildfire sometime during the next three decades. More than 20 million properties across the continental US are threatened by at least “moderate” wildfire risk. Those homes have up to a 6 percent chance of being in a blaze at some point over a 30-year timespan, the typical timeframe for a home mortgage.

Even a 1 percent chance of being in a wildfire is worth taking seriously. In comparison, the federal government considers an area with a 1 percent chance of flooding in a given year as a “Special Flood Hazard Area” on maps used to determine flood insurance rates. But unlike flooding, The New York Times reports, there hasn’t been comprehensive property-level data on wildfire risk until now.

Now, you can type an address into First Street’s online search tool to see the organization’s fire risk rating for that property (you’ll also find a flood risk rating from First Street). The information will also be incorporated into Realtor.com.

To assess each property’s risk, First Street built a peer-reviewed model using government data on available fuels (dry vegetation) and weather patterns. Then it was able to simulate over 100 million wildfires to see which properties they might threaten.

Using First Street’s Data, The Washington Post reports that one in six Americans now lives in a place with “significant” wildfire risk.

Wildfire seasons have become more intense as climate change makes the Western US hotter and drier. The past century of fire suppression has also made fires more devastating when they do break out since suppression tactics have allowed dry vegetation to build up to dangerous levels instead of allowing them to burn off in smaller, sporadic blazes. On top of that, residents have moved deeper into vulnerable locations where urban development meets fire-prone ecosystems, especially in states with soaring housing prices like California. There’s been an almost tenfold increase in costs associated with wildfires from $8.5 billion between 2012 and 2016 to $79.8 billion in costs from 2018 to 2021, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Image: First Street Foundation

Things are only going to get riskier as climate change continues to heat the planet, The Washington Post and First Street both warn. In 30 years, about one in five Americans will live in areas with significant risk.