ABSTRACT
Fortunately, the story does not end there. Fascination with the data and curiosity about what it implies, visible in Nordhaus’ early work on energy futures, has continued to inform his latter-day work on climate change. For example, after Hurricane Katrina he demonstrated that hurricane damages rise extraordinarily rapidly as wind speed increases. Basic physics suggests that damages should be proportional to the cube of wind speed, a relationship that is assumed in many models.2 Empirically, Nordhaus found, the relationship is much steeper, with damages proportional to the ninth power of wind speed (Nordhaus, 2010). This is plausible, he suggested, because many structures are little affected by strong winds up to a breaking point, at which point they experience large, discontinuous increases in damages. When wind speeds first exceed the breaking points of many structures, aggregate damages can rise quite steeply. Other researchers have found similar, if not quite as extreme, patterns in hurricane damages as a function of wind speed (Bouwer & Wouter Botzen, 2011).
