washington post (The Washington Post) explains exactly this in a recent article titled The Real Reason Billion-Dollar Disasters Like Hurricane Helen Are Becoming More Common Billion-dollar disasters aren't becoming more common As storms become more extreme or common, Rather, economic and demographic trends have changed. [emphasis, links added]
this is true.
Although the article begins by asserting that climate change is a problem and that we should not question the transition away from fossil fuels, overall it provides a fairly balanced and accurate discussion of why the costs of natural disasters are rising.
Wapo wrote:
multi-billion dollar disaster The data set “is heavily cited, and people use it to say that climate change is already affecting everything we see. However, you can't really prove that unless you have the right economic principles. Longest-tenured manager .
Baker and others say debating whether the effects of global warming can be found in disaster data is different from questioning whether climate change is real or whether society should abandon fossil fuels.
“We know climate change is real. We are [economic] Laurens Bouwer, an expert in climate risk assessment and lead author of five reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an advisory body for scientists to reach consensus on climate change, said the advisory body is used by scientists to reach consensus on climate change.
this is more or less true (minus the part about moving away from fossil fuels)the WaPo article details how the “billion dollar disaster” narrative went off the rails.
climate realism This has been said many times ( here , here , and here , to name a few). Basically, the argument goes like this: Weather is getting worse due to human-caused climate change, so the cost of weather disasters is increasing.
Weather data shows this statement to be patently false. Data almost universally shows that storms like hurricanes and tornadoes are not becoming more frequent or extreme. Neither will floods or periods of drought.
So what was the cause of the multi-billion dollar disaster?
Roger Pielke Jr., a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has long studied the cost impacts of natural disasters and put them into context.
WaPo contacted him for this article because of his research in the 1990s that found: When changes in population and property values in hurricane-prone areas are taken into account, hurricane losses do not increase at all.
He has often condemned this misuse of data, Calling the use of this term in the National Climate Assessment (NCA) report a “national disgrace”.
Even worse than simply claiming that the number of multi-billion dollar disasters caused by climate change is increasing, When disasters hit multiple states, NCA overestimated the actual number of disasters by three times by double and triple counting single events. Regardless of whether the incident caused $1 billion in damage in each affected state.
Pielke noted in his own Substack that the WaPo article managed to garner some “compelling” comments from various so-called climate experts, They admit that they operate on attribution assumptionsor make Disaster costs are linked to climate because there is “stress,” not necessarily because the science supports it.
In the end, WaPo correctly identified the attribution of disaster costs, writing:
[A]According to disaster experts, former NOAA officials and peer-reviewed scientific research… [t]his truth [is] … Over time, migration to disaster-prone areas continues to increase, putting more people and property at risk. Disasters are more costly because there is more to destroy.
…
There are more and more disasters every year, but… Meteorologists Neil Lott and Tom Ross [of] The National Climatological Data Center…doesn't think the weather has changed. Instead, they noticed more people and property in areas prone to natural disasters.
It's great that the Washington Post (WaPo), often one of the worst offenders of climate-related fake news and misinformation, is finally getting one right.
Climate change does not cause weather to worsen and therefore cannot be held responsible for rising weather-related costs.
In this case, one can only hope that other media outlets start to follow WaPo's example and publish balanced, fact-based and informative articles about climate change, Missing the Washington Post editorial about the need to move away from fossil fuels would, of course, be disastrous in terms of storm preparedness, human avoidance, resilience, and recovery.
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