A changing climate makes disasters worse. Can Americans count on their government to help?
As the United States marks its 250th birthday, Straight Arrow is taking a fresh look at the institutions, systems and social contracts that shaped modern America — and the pressures now testing them.
As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, the very ground upon which the nation sits is fundamentally shifting under the weight of a changing climate.
From Louisiana’s eroding coastline to California’s wildfire-scorched earth, America bears the scars of every type of natural disaster Mother Nature has to offer: hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires and floods.
And now, the combination of strengthening natural disasters and diminishing government intervention further endangers U.S. landscapes — and the people who live there.
While partisans may dispute the science, data show that climate change is real — and the disasters it creates are getting worse. Denial is no longer an option, said Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
“People are really starting to pay attention and take notice and realize that what this government has been telling them is just not true — that in fact, the climate crisis is here,” Francis told Straight Arrow. “It’s happening now. It’s affecting all of us. It’s affecting our wallets. It’s affecting our communities, and people are really starting to realize this is a problem that can’t be swept under the rug.”
Climate change impact
As climate change becomes increasingly politicized, even the way Americans discuss the topic is evolving. For years, discourse revolved around a single concept: “global warming.”
The earth is, in fact, warming. Global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.36 degrees per decade since 1982, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Global oceans just recorded their highest average temperature ever for the month of June.
But experts now agree warming is but one symptom of a permanently altered climate. And that change in climate, according to NOAA, “is unequivocally caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities — primarily burning fossil fuels.”
Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, where they trap heat, drive temperatures upward and accelerate weather volatility.
“There’s a lot of different ways that climate change is affecting weather patterns and storms,” Francis said.
America’s litany of disasters — with the exception of earthquakes — have all been worsened by climate change. For hurricanes in particular, the impact is clear. Since the 1970s, the number of hurricanes that have reached category 3 or greater has increased by roughly 8% per decade.
Hurricanes thrive on warm water and moisture in the air. As Atlantic temperatures warm at a record pace, they create the perfect storm for a perfect storm.
“We’re seeing more hurricanes intensify rapidly, which is a technical measurement of hurricanes,” Francis said.
The increase in stronger hurricanes goes hand-in-hand with an uptick in major flooding incidents around the U.S.
Typically, flooding is the second-deadliest disaster in the U.S. each year, behind only extreme heat — which also worsens with climate change.
“I was struck by how much more often flooding occurs,” said Rafael Lemaitre, former director of public affairs at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “And it’s not necessarily even flooding from storms; it’s nuisance flooding that happens more frequently because of sea level rise and because of climate change.”
Wildfires are also strengthened by warming global temperatures. As the world’s bodies of water and surrounding air see more moisture, desert climates experience record dry spells and heat waves.
“Those dry periods are extending longer, so we’re seeing drought get longer lasting and also more intense,” Francis said. “The combination of the heat plus the dryness creates the conditions necessary for fires to form.”
Scientists estimate that even a 2-degree Fahrenheit rise in annual average temperature increases the median burned area as much as 600% per year.
Dangers to America
Every year, natural disasters claim hundreds, sometimes thousands, of lives in America — a country that battles more natural disasters than any other.
America has experienced extremely destructive hurricanes since the nation’s founding, although they weren’t always tracked with the sophisticated equipment that the government uses today. In 1900, a Category 4 hurricane killed 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas, leveling the barrier island. It remains the deadliest natural disaster to ever hit the U.S., partly because residents had not been warned it was coming.
The first weather satellite didn’t go up until the 1960s, and NOAA didn’t exist until the 1970s. Tools that forecast major storms can save lives, but cannot spare cities altogether.
More Americans than ever now live in areas that are vulnerable to these kinds of disasters.
“We’ve got more people in harm’s way, and plus we are increasing the intensity of these kinds of storms and the heavy precipitation events, so it’s a sort of double whammy there,” Francis said.
Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,800 people in 2005, and caused $201 billion in damage, adjusted for inflation, according to the National Weather Service.
The magnitude of damage inflicted on property and infrastructure by disasters cannot be ignored. It could be another decade, for instance, before two Southern California communities — Pacific Palisades and Altadena — are made whole following last year’s wildfires. A total of 17,000 structures burned, and 31 people died.
Across the United States, aging roads, bridges and power grids are increasingly vulnerable to failure, leaving communities more exposed to disruptions from both everyday wear and extreme weather.
The federal government has taken notice: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently announced nearly $2 billion to rebuild roads and bridges damaged or destroyed by natural disasters. Much of that money will go to areas like North Carolina, which suffered extreme damage from Hurricane Helene.
That sum will help, but it is not a fix-all: Between 2023 and 2024, America recorded 55 disasters that caused more than $1 billion in damage each. Tracking these events has become more difficult; NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information discontinued its compilation of “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters,” citing “evolving priorities, statutory mandates and staffing changes.”
On average, the U.S. spends $149 billion a year responding to disasters — 50% higher than the previous decade. At the same time, critics say, the government has backed away from spending that might prevent disasters from causing so much damage.
“They have put less emphasis on mitigation of risk in advance of disaster, and that just means that the federal government will end up likely having to pay more in disaster response and in disaster recovery,” Alice Hill, the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Straight Arrow.
What’s more, as climate risks skyrocket, major insurers are fleeing disaster-prone states like California and Florida, leaving residents without a private safety net.
“The assets that are usually damaged are either owned by state and local governments, like highways, or they’re private property, and both state and local governments and individuals should have insurance for natural disasters,” said Chris Edwards, an economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
That, he said, is a double-edged sword.
“People who have homes in dangerous places, they need to get insurance, but I also think that there’s a problem if we continue to subsidize insurance for people to live in dangerous areas,” Edwards told Straight Arrow.
FEMA, which manages the National Flood Insurance Program, can and has stepped in to assist homeowners struggling to rebuild.
“Standard homeowners insurance does not cover flooding unless you get supplemental flood insurance,” Lemaitre, the former FEMA official, said.
But most homeowners, even in flood-prone areas, do not have flood insurance. Privatizing the NFIP, as the Trump administration has recommended, could lead to growing insurance gaps for those most vulnerable to floods.
Landscape changes
Climate change is actively reshaping America’s physical landscape from sea to encroaching sea.
“As the planet warms, the seas are getting higher, some places more than others, and that is putting a lot of coastal cities directly in harm’s way, as a storm comes now on top of a higher sea level,” Francis said.
The change to Louisiana’s coastline from repeated storms is even visible from space. Since the 1930s, the state has lost roughly 2,000 square miles of land — an area larger than all of Delaware or Rhode Island.
This goes beyond hurricanes: Wildfires can turn forests into grassland and fundamentally change soil structure by killing microorganisms that help plants grow. Then there are shifting floodplains, the flat, low-lying land next to a river or stream that is prone to flooding when the water overflows its banks.
Major rivers like the Mississippi have seen their floodplains change for decades.
Response history
These disasters have profoundly impacted American history across all its 250 years: The Great Hurricane of 1780 crippled European fleets during the American Revolutionary War. The Congressional Act of 1803, the nation’s first disaster law, provided assistance to the town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after a devastating fire.
In 1970, President Richard Nixon created NOAA, saying the U.S. faced “immediate and compelling needs for better protection of life and property from natural hazards.”
President Jimmy Carter created FEMA in 1979 to centralize what had been a scattered response to disasters. Since then, presidents have pushed FEMA in several different directions.
Ronald Reagan directed FEMA to focus on nuclear war planning before Bill Clinton elevated the agency to the cabinet level, granting it greater power.
George W. Bush deprioritized FEMA shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, moving it into the newly created Department of Homeland Security and canceling several disaster-prevention programs. Then came Katrina.
“Hurricane Katrina is this watershed moment in our national emergency response system,” Lemaitre said.
There was no preventing Katrina. But when FEMA — led by a political appointee, rather than a subject matter expert — finally mobilized a full response to the emergency four days after the storm hit, death and damage tolls were already catastrophic.
“We saw what happens when you have an underfunded, under-respected agency like FEMA, led by political leadership instead of experienced emergency managers,” Lemaitre said.
Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden expanded FEMA’s role in the post-Katrina years, but the Trump administration has cut it aggressively and plans to eliminate the agency entirely, saying states should take more responsibility for planning for and responding to disasters.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency reduced FEMA’s full-time workforce by about a third.
“It should be growing, not shrinking, because that is all just decades of talent that we’re losing with all these federal employees being let go, or morale being low,” Monica Medina, professor of psychology and evolutionary biology at UCLA, told Straight Arrow.
Dismantling FEMA?
The Trump administration defends its revamping of FEMA.
“FEMA has returned to its original mission as a lean, rapid-response force designed to support — not replace — state, tribal and local leaders,” a FEMA spokesperson told Straight Arrow. “FEMA stands ready to deliver swift, compassionate and fully coordinated aid to every American. At the same time, we are fiercely protecting taxpayer dollars and disaster assistance funds through robust fraud prevention efforts.”
Edwards, the Cato Institute economist, said that while putting states in charge “sounds like a pretty drastic kind of solution,” disaster response “is supposed to be a bottom-up system organized by state and local governments.”
Massive environmental disasters, however, can overexert state resources.
“FEMA and NOAA are the glue that hold the nation’s emergency management system together,” said Lemaitre, who worked at FEMA during the Obama administration. “I didn’t call them the backbone, because the tip of the spear when it comes to managing and responding to disasters continues and always has been the state’s governors.”
The total cost of damage incurred during Katrina rang in several times higher than Louisiana’s entire $18 billion budget for the 2005 fiscal year. And UCLA estimated the damage from last year’s California wildfires cost anywhere from a quarter to half of the entire state budget, which is the largest in the country.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction put those estimates even higher.
“When storms are growing more severe and frequent, you don’t gut the national agency that serves as the backup to these local and state first responders who need and deserve the help,” Lemaitre said.
Many states do work together when natural disasters hit.
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Florida, Georgia and other states sent emergency crews to North Carolina to help.
But states have routinely relied on FEMA for support.
That includes Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis supported Trump’s diminishment of FEMA — even after asking President Joe Biden to approve a disaster declaration for the state in the wake of Hurricane Ian in 2022.
Shutting down FEMA would be a shock to the disaster-recovery system.
“It would be a learning curve, but the sooner we get started, the better,” Cato’s Edwards said. “I think the residents of each state demand that their own state government is ready.”
Others say the agency is necessary.
“FEMA and the forecasting and the science that NOAA provides have been so critical in helping save lives and support state responses to emergencies and disasters, both large and small,” Lemaitre said.
‘We need to treat the disease’
Most Americans believe climate change is real. Trump, however, has called it a hoax and questioned whether it is caused by human activity, all while supporting the fossil fuel industry. This, along with the federal government’s plans to eliminate FEMA as storms worsen, has caused some strife.
“We need to treat the disease that’s causing all this to happen in the first place, and that is the fact that we’ve been burning fossil fuels for decades now,” said Francis, the climate scientist.
And Americans are chiming in. According to new data from Pew Research, many Americans believe the federal government should assist people in communities that are at a high risk of hazardous weather.
The weather is famously hard to predict. And the further out the forecast, the muddier the image. Much of the way the weather shapes America’s future could depend on who is leading the nation and their beliefs about both climate change and emergency management.
“I fear,” Lemaitre said, “that we’re on track to relearn the lessons of Katrina.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
