Last June, I published a peer review paper on the question of NOAA Billion Dollar Disaster (BDD) tabulation. [emphasis, links added]
Today, NOAA announced that the agency will no longer update the BDD tabulation and explain that it has been “retired”.
Although some media choose to bring BDD about the Trump administration's retirement There are also some excellent reports that the retirement of watchmaking is more complicated.
CBS News Excellent report:
According to the current NOAA employee, part of his reason for the decommissioning of anonymity due to concerns about unemployment is that it focuses on economics and analysis of various data sets, so the billion-dollar database was partially because it was not the “core”. Additionally, the database’s lead researcher resigned last month from the separation incentive program. . .
For years, Roger Pielke Jr. Pielke, a senior fellow at the American College of Corporate and a senior fellow with faculty at Colorado-Boulder University, believed it needed better metadata, review and documentation. He published a paper on databases last year in Nature, saying the paper failed to meet NOAA’s “procedural and material standards” based on the institution’s “information quality and scientific integrity policy.”
“I'm a big fan of NOAA and the National Weather Service, who play a huge public service role, and I'm not happy with the sledgehammer that was brought to the agency,” Pielke said in a telephone interview with CBS News.
He said having the climatologists in charge of data had problems and led to some quality control issues that could be solved by the appropriate economists. He also said the current dataset cannot be resolved by NOAA, but it is important for another federal agency to take disaster seriously and track data.
Interestingly, according to CBS News Report, the NOAA leaders under President Biden are very sympathetic to my criticism.
Washington Post Also recognizing the nuance here, based on the newspaper's early deep dive (by Harry Stevens, now at SUNY) to the billion-dollar disaster list:
Tracking disaster costs is crucial, says Roger Pielke, a senior fellow at the American College of Enterprise, but adds that there are better approaches than what has been taken since the NOAA. As an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Pielke studied the database and said he found how calculating loss estimates or inflation rates caused the disaster the institution tracked over nearly fifty years.
“For the federal government, tracking the cost of disaster is absolutely important; there is no doubt,” Pilk said. “Maybe it's an opportunity to do things right.”
Posts Includes important information blocks:
Many of the agency's recent departures include Adam Smith, who led a billion-dollar disaster plan for 15 years before leaving last week.
Since the method NOAA used to generate loss estimates is neither public nor (as far as I know) written down, it may be that the institution may have lost the ability to continue as Smith left.
Note that tabulation reappears in the climate advocacy group, which is probably the best place for this avatar.
Interestingly, sometime after my paper was published last year, NOAA added a disclaimer to the BDD homepage:
This product does not focus on climate event attribution.
After years of arguments, media encouraged to report the opposite situation and watch policy makers claim the opposite, it turns out that it was too late to return the horse to the barn.
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