ALARMISMBAD SCIENCE JOURNALISM No, CNN, Climate Change is Not Costing the U.S. Billions
From ClimateREALISM By Linnea Lueken
No, CNN, Climate Change is Not Costing the U.S. Billions
ALARMISMBAD SCIENCE JOURNALISM
No, CNN, Climate Change is Not Costing the U.S. Billions
CNN Business posted an article titled “Climate change is costing the US $150 billion a year. Here’s what that looks like,” which cites a recent government climate report to claim that global warming is causing an increase in costly weather disasters. This is false. Data refutes the assertion that extreme weather is becoming more frequent or severe. As a result, climate change cannot be behind the rise in weather related damage. The real reason is a matter of demographics and economics, especially population growth and increased development in natural disaster-prone areas.
CNN claims that the United States experiences a weather event costing $1 billion in damage every three weeks, as opposed to “40 years ago, when extreme weather episodes that cost an inflation-adjusted $1 billion happened once every four months on average.” This figure comes from the Biden administration’s recent National Climate Assessment (NCA) report.
What CNN neglects to mention in their effort to tie rising disaster costs to climate change is that property values – both in the form of objects like houses, cars, and home goods, as well as land values – have increased over time. This obviously contributes to the rising costs of damages, with or without inflation factored in. In addition, more people than ever before insure their property, under various government backed flood, disaster, and crop insurance programs.
Coastal development has increased over time as well, and the total number of people (and their possessions) has also increased in the United States, particularly in states like Florida, Texas, and California, which are prone to natural disasters like hurricanes, severe droughts, and wildfires, all of which damage property. (See figure below)
Florida’s population, for example, has nearly doubled since 1983, putting an additional 10 million people in harm’s way when hurricanes strike there. Population and associated development has also increased in most other coastal locations and along attractive rivers and streams, meaning when hurricanes occur or rivers rise, more people are at ground zero for harm.
The Daily Caller interviewed University of Colorado professor and climate researcher Roger Pielke, Jr., who explained plainly that “[t]here is no peer reviewed science that attributes any part of increasing disaster losses to changes in climate,” says economic data is not a good metric for making claims about climate change, largely because of the economic conditions that change regardless of the weather.
CNN also says that the “cost of extreme weather events is expected to grow in the near term with a projected rise in sea levels and temperatures,” but this is more unsupported speculation. While it is true that sea levels have risen gradually since the end of the last glaciation, as discussed in Climate Realism post “Sorry, Washington Post, Climate Change Isn’t Worsening Hurricanes, but Storm-Resilient Military Bases Make Sense,” there is no evidence that sea level rise is making it so storms are more damaging. Also, as Climate Realism has pointed out many times, there is no data showing an increase in severe tropical cyclones.
Regarding the point on temperature, CNN does not elaborate on how higher temperatures will cause more costly damage, except that they say “agricultural losses” and “worker injuries” are counted among the NCA report’s damage calculations. This is nebulous at best, but crop production in the United States has been increasing over the same period of modest warming, and worker injuries don’t appear to be getting more common, according to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. (See figure below)
There has been no increase in heatwaves in the United States, either, with the most extreme recorded summer heat in U.S. history was during the 1930s, well before climate alarmists claim there was accelerated human-caused warming.
Weather and natural disasters certainly result in billions of dollars in cost each year, but using economic figures as proof of a climate catastrophe is misleading. Not only has extreme weather not become worse in the United States over time, but the NCA report and CNN both ignore myriad the other factors, like population growth and greater development, that result in higher damages costs now than in the past when extreme weather and other types of disasters strike.
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17 COMMENTS
Oldest
2hotel9
December 4, 2023 6:07 am
Yet again proof that when people refuse accept lies from media, government and academia all three just tell bigger lies louder.
20
Walter R. Hogle
Reply to 2hotel9
December 4, 2023 10:58 am
Desperation.
0
ResourceGuy
December 4, 2023 6:11 am
Almost all media groups climb on board with extra indefensible climate claims during climate meetings as part of the promotional period. It was most extreme and educational to see this pattern during the lead up to the Paris Agreement®️.
5
Bryan A
December 4, 2023 6:32 am
The tilting of Billion$ at windmills and other useless energy sources (Solar), as well as lost productivity, industrial job losses to overseas manufacturing and inflation brought about through the vilification of high density energy, has cost Trillions$ more than supposed Climate Change damages and has produced Net Zero effect on the weather
10
Bryan A
Reply to Bryan A
December 4, 2023 10:47 am
In fact, 2004 up to Dec31 2022 the $4.5T has been spent on just the renewables portion of fighting this nonexistent boogeyman with more than $4B being spent in 2023 by June 30. So easily over $5T by years end. And again, Net Zero to show for the bad investment
0
strativarius
December 4, 2023 7:14 am
“CNN does not elaborate on how higher temperatures will cause more costly damage”
Perhaps The Guardian can help?
“”Extreme weather could shut down one in 12 hospitals worldwide, report warns
Total of 16,245 hospitals at high risk by end of century unless fossil fuels phased out, analysts say
…
Our analysis shows that without a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, the risks to global health will be exacerbated further, as thousands of hospitals become unable to deliver services during crises.” Although some of the hospitals can be adapted to face the effects of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, severe storms, flooding and forest fires, many will have to be moved at great expense.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/02/extreme-weather-could-shut-down-one-in-12-hospitals-worldwide-report-warns
No, it can’t. It didn’t even bother to provide a link to the Cross Dependency Initiative (XDI) outfit behind this Earth shattering news. But here’s what they have to say about their “climate risk engines”:
“The Climate Risk Engines have driven innovation in defining, pricing and responding to physical climate risk.
The Climate Risk Engines extract dynamically downscaled global and regional climate change models and combine these with global and local data sets, applying bespoke probabilistic algorithms to produce decision-ready financial and risk metrics. Results are expressed in a range of engineering or financial metrics to inform decision-making at all scales.”
https://xdi.systems/about-us#climate-risk-engines
Results are expressed in the number of halfwits handing over large wadges of cash.
8
Dave Andrews
Reply to strativarius
December 4, 2023 7:50 am
‘Climate risk engines’ – you don’t need to know how they work, leave that to us and we will also tell you what it means for you so you know how to deal with it. Now about the cost…….
1
ToldYouSo
Reply to strativarius
December 4, 2023 9:54 am
Climate Risk Engines violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics the first Law of Logic*.
*Best paraphrased by Richard Feynman: “The first principle is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
3
morfu03
December 4, 2023 7:19 am
Ah, very nice article! I was still stuck at how attribution scientists have “proven” that their studies can detect climate change signals in local extreme weather patterns and how that whole proof must be wrong as there is no climate signal for extreme weather.
But writing this I realize that models could indeed have such signals.
Regardless it is another example where climate scientists get it wrong – again.
However, this article makes a very important point for the political consequences of Alimonti´s findings!
Uh and in this context I would like to mention again the
climate scientists successfully censoring a peer reviewed and published article by Alimonti et al. earlier this year, circumventing the scientific process like it was done by the catholic church in the middle age:
The names of these people are:
Greg Holland, Lisa Alexander, Steve Sherwood, Michael Mann, Richard Betts, Friederike Otto, Stefan Rahmstorf and Peter Cox
Details of the story can be found here: