A good blog by Matt ygelsias about the danger of increasing the coefficient of variation of our weather:
"It turns out, you see, that the infrastructure of Washington DC was built with certain expectations about weather patterns in mind. But “outlier” events occur that exceed the limits of the infrastructure. This creates problems for the people who live here. Meanwhile, relatively small shifts in the average state of the weather lead to extremely large increases in the quantity of outlier events. The United States is a very wealthy country, so we have plenty of resources to dedicate to trying to deal with these kind of problems as they arise. Nevertheless, diversion of resources to adapting to increases in the frequency of outlier events reducing the quantity of resources that would otherwise be available for other purposes. What’s more, part of being a wealthy country is that we already have a huge amount of fixed investment in infrastructure and buildings that becomes less valuable as weather patterns shift away from what was expected."
I made this point elsewhere on this site - even if the temperature increases just a little we have based our industrial society on a certain weather, wind and rain pattern.
