Advancing the estimation of future climate impacts within the United States

Evidence of the physical and economic impacts of climate change is a critical input to policy development and decision-making. In addition to the magnitude of potential impacts, detailed estimates of where, when, and to whom those damages may occur; the types of impacts that will be most damaging; uncertainties in these damages; and the ability of adaptation to reduce potential risks are all interconnected and important considerations. This study utilizes the reduced-complexity model, the Framework for Evaluating Damages and Impacts (FrEDI), to rapidly project economic and physical impacts of climate change across 10 000 future scenarios for multiple impact sectors, regions, and populations within the contiguous United States (US). Results from FrEDI show that net national damages increase overtime, with mean climate-driven damages estimated to reach USD 2.9 trillion (95 % confidence interval (CI): USD 510 billion to USD 12 trillion) annually by 2090. Detailed FrEDI results show that for the analyzed sectors the majority of annual long-term (e.g., 2090) damages are associated with climate change impacts to human health, including mortality attributable to climate-driven changes in temperature and air pollution (O3 and PM2.5) exposure. Regional results also show that annual long-term climate-driven damages vary geographically. The Southeast (all regions are as defined in Fig. 5) is projected to experience the largest annual damages per capita (mean: USD 9300 per person annually; 95 % CI: USD 1800–USD 37 000 per person annually), whereas the smallest damages per capita are expected in the Southwest (mean: USD 6300 per person annually; 95 % CI: USD 840–USD 27 000 per person annually). Climate change impacts may also broaden existing societal inequalities, with, for example, Black or African Americans being disproportionately affected by additional premature mortality from changes in air quality. Lastly, FrEDI projections are extended through 2300 to estimate the net present climate-driven damages within US borders from marginal changes in greenhouse gas emissions. Combined, this analysis provides the most detailed illustration to date of the distribution of climate change impacts within US borders.</p

Like a thief in the night : Agamben, Hobbes and the messianic transvaluation of security

The article addresses the reinterpretation of the problematic of security in the messianic turn in contemporary continental political thought. I focus on Giorgio Agamben's reinterpretation of Hobbes's Leviathan in Stasis, which restores an eschatological dimension to this foundational text of modern security politics. Hobbes's commonwealth has been traditionally read as a secularized version of the katechon, a force that restrains the state of nature while drawing on its resources. Instead, Agamben argues that for Hobbes, the state is neither the analogue of God's kingdom on earth nor the katechon that delays its arrival, but the profane power that will disappear when the kingdom of God is established on earth. It is thus in principle incapable of attaining the peace and security that it claims to provide, perpetually producing insecurity and violence in the guise of protection. In Agamben's reading, it is precisely this failure of the state's security apparatuses that assists the advent of the messianic event in an oblique fashion. The exposure of this failure does not aspire to the improvement of the apparatuses of security or resign us to inescapable insecurity but only affirms the need to render the present apparatuses inoperative, bringing forth a future without them.Peer reviewe

Quantifying and monetizing potential climate change policy impacts on terrestrial ecosystem carbon storage and wildfires in the United States

This paper develops and applies methods to quantify and monetize projected impacts on terrestrial ecosystem carbon storage and areas burned by wildfires in the contiguous United States under scenarios with and without global greenhouse gas mitigation. The MC1 dynamic global vegetation model is used to develop physical impact projections using three climate models that project a range of future conditions. We also investigate the sensitivity of future climates to different initial conditions of the climate model. Our analysis reveals that mitigation, where global radiative forcing is stabilized at 3.7&nbsp;W/m 2 in 2100, would consistently reduce areas burned from 2001 to 2100 by tens of millions of hectares. Monetized, these impacts are equivalent to potentially avoiding billions of dollars (discounted) in wildfire response costs. Impacts to terrestrial ecosystem carbon storage are less uniform, but changes are on the order of billions of tons over this time period. The equivalent social value of these changes in carbon storage ranges from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars (discounted). The magnitude of these results highlights their importance when evaluating climate policy options. However, our results also show national outcomes are driven by a few regions and results are not uniform across regions, time periods, or models. Differences in the results based on the modeling approach and across initializing conditions also raise important questions about how variability in projected climates is accounted for, especially when considering impacts where extreme or threshold conditions are important

Climate change impacts on flood risk and asset damages within mapped 100-year floodplains of the contiguous United States

A growing body of work suggests that the extreme weather events that drive inland flooding are likely to increase in frequency and magnitude in a warming climate, thus potentially increasing flood damages in the future. We use hydrologic projections based on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) to estimate changes in the frequency of modeled 1 % annual exceedance probability (1 % AEP, or 100-year) flood events at 57 116 stream reaches across the contiguous United States (CONUS). We link these flood projections to a database of assets within mapped flood hazard zones to model changes in inland flooding damages throughout the CONUS over the remainder of the 21st century. Our model generates early 21st century flood damages that reasonably approximate the range of historical observations and trajectories of future damages that vary substantially depending on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions pathway. The difference in modeled flood damages between higher and lower emissions pathways approaches USD 4 billion per year by 2100 (in undiscounted 2014 dollars), suggesting that aggressive GHG emissions reductions could generate significant monetary benefits over the long term in terms of reduced flood damages. Although the downscaled hydrologic data we used have been applied to flood impacts studies elsewhere, this research expands on earlier work to quantify changes in flood risk by linking future flood exposure to assets and damages on a national scale. Our approach relies on a series of simplifications that could ultimately affect damage estimates (e.g., use of statistical downscaling, reliance on a nationwide hydrologic model, and linking damage estimates only to 1 % AEP floods). Although future work is needed to test the sensitivity of our results to these methodological choices, our results indicate that monetary damages from inland flooding could be significantly reduced through substantial GHG mitigation