NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Disasters Report Is Proof Of Govt-Funded Alarmism, Not Climate Change by Ronald Bailey
Specifically, Roger Pielke, Jr. argues that “NOAA incorrectly claims that for some types of extreme weather, the dataset demonstrates detection and attribution of changes on climate timescales.
NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Disasters Report Is Proof Of Govt-Funded Alarmism, Not Climate Change
in Extreme Weather, News
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“Billion-dollar weather and climate disasters broke U.S. record in 2023, NOAA says,” reported PBS earlier this year.
“NOAA: US sees record number of billion-dollar weather, climate disasters in 2023,” observed Fox Weather.
“U.S. Hit by Record Number of High-Cost Disasters in 2023,” declared The New York Times.
These and many more headlines were based on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) January press release reporting the agency’s annual tally of weather disasters. [emphasis, links added]
It states:
The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has released the final update to its 2023 Billion-dollar disaster report, confirming a historic year in the number of costly disasters and extremes throughout much of the country. There were 28 weather and climate disasters in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2020, tallying a price tag of at least $92.9 billion.
In a new article in the journal npj Natural Hazards, University of Colorado Boulder political scientist and climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr. challenges the scientific integrity of these annual NOAA climate and weather disaster reports.
“The point here is not to call into question the reality or importance of human-caused climate change—it is real, and it is important,” explains Pielke. “Rather, the question is whether the NOAA billion-dollar disaster time series provides evidence of detection or attribution of changes in the climate of extreme weather events in the United States, as frequently claimed.”
For example, citing NOAA’s dataset, the Fifth National Climate Assessment (2023)declares that “the number and cost of weather-related disasters have increased dramatically over the past four decades, in part due to the increasing frequency and severity of extreme events,” adding that “there is increasing confidence that changes in some extreme events are driven by human-caused climate change.”
Relying on NOAA data, the White House issued a statement in 2023 on behalf of President Joe Biden that asserted “climate change-related extreme weather events still pose a rapidly intensifying threat—one that costs the U.S. at least $150 billion each year.”
While NOAA notes that “the increase in population and material wealth over the last several decades [is] an important cause for the rising costs,” the agency also claims that “it’s likely that human-caused climate change is influencing the rising costs of billion-dollar disasters.”
It is this latter assertion that Pielke’s analysis challenges.
Specifically, Pielke argues that “NOAA incorrectly claims that for some types of extreme weather, the dataset demonstrates detection and attribution of changes on climate timescales.
“Similarly flawed are NOAA’s claims that increasing annual counts of billion-dollar disasters are in part a consequence of human-caused climate change.”
Just how NOAA calculates the number and costs of each disaster is methodologically opaque. The agency says that the costs of the disasters it includes are inflation-adjusted over time.
However, Pielke identifies numerous examples in NOAA’s tally in which the costs of specific disasters have been unaccountably boosted well above inflation adjustments.
For instance, Pielke compares the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) losses for several major hurricanes with NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster (BBD) losses for each of those hurricanes.
In these examples, NOAA has significantly boosted the calculated hurricane losses well above the inflation-adjusted figures.
Why? NOAA says that “one of the key transformations” in its calculations is “scaling up insured loss data to account for uninsured and underinsured losses, which differs by peril, geography, and asset class.”
However, as Pielke points out, “NOAA makes no details available on the methodology or basis for such transformations, nor their impact on loss estimates, nor how these transformations may change over time.”
Consequently, this fails the requirement for data transparency that would enable outside analysts to evaluate the sufficiency and accuracy of the calculations.
Pielke points out that NOAA does acknowledge that disaster losses are rising in part due to increasing wealth that puts more assets at risk as they build up along vulnerable coastlines and wildland-urban interfaces.
However, the agency does not adjust its calculations for such changes in asset exposure or vulnerability.
Pielke argues that a better way to track how extreme weather events are affecting the U.S. economy is to calculate such losses as a percentage of gross domestic product(GDP) over time. Such a calculation finds that weather and climate disaster losses as a percentage of U.S. GDP show no increase between 1990 and 2019.
“The most appropriate data for investigating detection and attribution of changes in climate variables will always be climate data and not economic data,” concludes Pielke.
“Any claim that the NOAA billion-dollar disaster dataset indicates worsening weather or worsening disasters is incomplete at best and misleading at worst.”
Read more at Reason
From Democracy to Democrazy, by Graham.
This SCOTUS decision should be simple. Allowing a President - or a candidate for the presidency - to break the laws that govern our nation, enables a dictatorship.
The plague that has besieged our democratic nation has come from the eastern direction - namely Russia. Anyone who thinks that Trump and his criminal buddies like Guiliani are smart enough to create this infectious and alien species of Republicans is not living in real time. What we are seeing happening in our country is a destructive and invasive plan carefully assembled by Russia.
No, I am not delusional. I spent 12 years studying Russia including learning Russian, then the next 20 years off and on living in Russia and Russian-speaking countries. I wrote From Democracy to Democrazy as a warning to all Americans. Yes, the Russians are coming and 95% of Americans are not cognizant of Trump's linkage and affinity to Russia. This is because the Mueller Report sorely failed - but that is another day's discussion.
Donald Trump is not smart. The Washington Post 2020 poll asked Americans "Do you think Trump has the mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president? Fifty-two percent of the respondents said no." "The 2017 Washington Post-ABC News poll asked people an open-ended question: What one word best describes Trump? The most common term to describe him was 'incompetent.' Other related characterizations included 'idiot,', 'ignorant,' and 'unqualified." The Quinnipiac poll asked the same question in 2017, and "by far, the most frequent word that came to mind was 'idiot', 'incompetent,' 'moron,' 'ignorant,' and 'stupid." The point is: Trump did not concoct the plan to defeat our democracy. He is simply a puppet used by Putin toward Russia's achievement.
In 1997, a book was published in Russia called The Foundations of Geopolitics. Putin was surmised to be the ghost writer since this book outlined his goals as the second President of Russia. This book includes the internal destruction of the United States - a plan that Putin has dreamed of since childhood when his target was to join the KGB. He first obtained a law degree, was accepted into the KGB, then spent his spy years in East Germany. There he perfected his bribery skills on West German men and foreigners. He returned to Russia and was picked by Yeltsin to be the next president. In a blink, he transformed the Russian government into a solid dictatorship assembling other KGB/FSB men and women to support his "holy grail" of restoring Russia to its glory days of world domination - by destroying NATO, demolishing the United States, and obliterating the sovereign nation of Ukraine. In the June 2022 NYT's article titled "Putin Denounces the U.S. as a Fading World Power." Putin has built upon the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence (KGB) with the new organization called the FSB and helped to establish their policies and procedures with far more strategic planning expertise. From the time of his inauguration in 2000, Putin's number one target has been the United States, using Trump's idiocy who has been following Putin's instructions to the tee.
Do you recall when Trump hosted Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador and Sergey Lavrov, the Minister of Russian Foreign Affairs in the White House Oval Office? No other American government officials were invited and there were no translators. Trump, a kompromised American stooge, was fallaciously "showing off" his new dog house and tricks to his owners/controllers.
In the end of Catherine Belton's book called Putin's People, she concludes: "The Russian black-cash seemed to be digging in ever deeper. Their activities, combined with Trump's disregard for the institutions and codes of the U.S. democracy, were leading to a systematic standoff. . . From the beginning, the Russian black-cash networks had, in part, been embedded to erode the American system, and exacerbate corruption in the West. . . In the impeachment probe and the 2020 U.S. Presidential race, the dash between the democratic values and a Putin-style corrupt authoritarian order was reaching a denouement. Putin understands that Russia can spend any amount of money it wishes on sowing chaos in the West." Pragmatically, Putin won this round with democracy.
The U.S. Senate - replicating the Russian DUMA - had been Trump's ace in a hole and prevented impeachment. They were reacting out of fear of reprisal from Trump and his violent followers just like the elected Russian DUMA reacts to the threat of Putin. Threats had been made on all Republican Senators. Afterward, Gonzales (R) of Ohio refused to run for re-election and hired 24-hour protection for his family. He was one of the ten Republicans who voted FOR impeachment. It is safe to say that Putin had already predicted this in advance and knew the full implications of preventing Trump's impeachment.
Belton goes on to say: "The Russian network and system of KGB capitalism has infiltrated the West - and it still operates twenty-four hours per day. It has penetrated our banks and financial institutions, our consumer supplies, our government's vital automated information systems, our health systems and hospitals, our gas, oil, and energy sources and probably every single aspect of American life." The plan for dismantling our democracy did not come from "stupid" Donald Trump. It came from Russia/Putin and has been in place for more than a quarter of a century.
SCOTUS has disgracefully attempted to analyze a President's right to break the law - the very laws that are the pillars of our democracy and they are obligated to safeguard. Because the majority of these judges were appointed by Trump, they are searching for barricades to protect HIM instead of our country.
The shadow cast by Putin over the landscape of American democracy, and his control over Trump is the destructive force we see happening NOW. Our democracy hangs in the balance and the tipping point may be the decision made today or tomorrow.
Elizabeth Graham
www.democrazy2020.org