The insurance industry currently estimates costs of US$20-35 billion for Harvey and US$30-40 billion for Irma...[however] this underestimate the real costs... Many people in the developing world are uninsured, so their costs go uncounted... Advances in the science of attribution mean that finance to help victims of extreme weather made worse by climate change could in future come from another source... According to a peer-reviewed paper published in September... nearly 30 per cent of the rise in global sea level between 1880 and 2010 resulted from emissions traced to the 90 largest carbon producers...

A paper published in Nature Geoscience in September, argued that litigation could play a key role in spurring states and businesses to mitigate or adapt to risks associated with greenhouse gas emissions... [Co-author] Sophie Marjanac [explained that]...“Attribution science doesn’t mean that all fossil fuel majors are going to be sued next week.” Instead, she believes that local and central governments, utilities, infrastructure engineers and companies should be... fully integrating [climate science] into decisions in order to avoid court cases that could be brought using attribution science... [However, Marjanac said that]... “legal cases are inevitable because losses will continue to accumulate and the science will continue to get better. I can only hope that companies will mitigate their emissions in time to stop dangerous climate change, and to avoid protracted litigation in the future."