Extreme weather events lead to significant adverse societal costs. Extreme event attribution (EEA), a methodology that examines how anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have changed the occurrence of specific extreme weather events, allows us to quantify the climate change-induced component of these costs. We collect data from all available EEA studies, combine it with data on the socio-economic costs of these events and extrapolate missing data to arrive at an estimate of the global cost of extreme weather attributable to climate change over the past twenty years. We found that the US $$143 billion in annual costs of extreme events can be attributed to climate change. Most (63 %) of these are due to human loss of life. Our results suggest that frequently cited estimates of the economic costs of climate change, arrived at using integrated assessment models, may be significantly underestimated. (Rebecca Newman & Ilan Noy)