An excoriating report on the widely-quoted U.S. billion-dollar disaster database produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is about to be published in the new Springer journal Natural Hazards. The findings from this database have fuelled climate alarm for decades, and it is widely quoted by scientific journals, media and politicians. President Biden recently attributed all weather and climate related disaster costs in the U.S. during 2022 to human-caused climate change, citing the NOAA database. But in what is termed the first independent review of the work, science writer Roger Pielke Jnr. calls it an “egregious failure of scientific inquiry”. His inquiry is said to show that the database falls “comprehensively short” of meeting NOAA’s own requirements for traceability of sources and objective presentation of data.
The public assertions made by NOAA using its data are “flawed and misleading”, specifically claims attributing losses to human-caused climate change. “NOAA’s claims to have achieved detection and attribution are not supported by any scientific analysis that it has performed,” notes Pielke. Similarly flawed are NOAA’s claims that increasing annual counts of billion dollar disasters are in part a consequence of human-caused climate change. Pielke, a political science writer and former university professor, notes that since 1980, U.S. losses per disaster on a linear trend are down by about 80% as a proportion of gross domestic product.
Needless to say, none of this gets in the way of the catastrophisation of weather and natural disasters that underpins the alarm and hysteria promoting the collectivist Net Zero project. In common with many other state-funded meteorological organisations around the world, a scientific gloss is given to unfalsifiable pseudoscientific claims of climate collapse. Pielke observes that the NOAA official responsible for overseeing the database has stated that climate change is ”supercharging many of these extreme that can lead to billion dollar disasters”. Such comments are parroted by mainstream media with the Guardian recently commenting on NOAA disaster figures claiming “experts” warn that deadly weather events “are being turbo-charged by the climate crisis”.
Not according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, points out Pielke. It has only “low confidence” for the emergence of signals of climate impact drivers from river floods, heavy precipitation and pluvial flood, landslide, drought, fire weather, tropical cyclones, hail, severe weather storms and heavy snowfall. “That is,” observes Pielke, “each of the elements of the billion dollar disaster database.” NOAA is said to make strong claims of detection and attribution, “but provides no analyses in support of these claims”.
Any claim that NOAA’s disaster dataset indicates worsening weather or disasters is “incomplete at best and misleading at worst”. When losses are considered in the context of exposure changes such as much larger concentrations of population, continues Pielke, it becomes clear that the relative impact of extreme weather events in the U.S. has diminished over the past decades, “which is the exact opposite of claims made by NOAA… and the President of the United States, among many others”.
Objectivity seems to be a problem at the politicised U.S. weather service, as does traceability of sources. Pielke considers the case of hurricane Idalia, which made landfall in Florida in September last year. NOAA has increased its loss estimate from an initial $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion, despite official November 2023 estimates of insured losses of just $310 million. The past practice of NOAA has been to double insured losses to arrive at an estimate of actual financial damage. What is the basis for NOAA’s estimate of Idalia damage being 12 times current insured losses, asks the author.
NOAA states that it factors in various indirect costs to arrive at overall loss estimates, including business interruption losses and wildfire suppression activities. But it fails to identify its sources, charges Pielke. He picks up on the fact that “livestock feeding costs” are added to the disaster mix. “Livestock feeding costs are not considered a disaster cost in conventional disaster accounting methods – it is unclear what other sorts of indirect costs might be included in the NOAA tabulations,” writes the author.
A more serious complaint appears to surround the retrospective addition of disasters to the recent historical record. Between late 2022 and an update published in mid-2023, 10 new events were added and just three deleted. There is said to be no documentary justification provided for these changes. Pielke also discovered that between 1980 and 2007, smaller disasters up to $2 billion in losses were fairly constant, and then sharply increased from 2008.
NOAA adjusts its past loss totals for inflation and this leads to additions to the database once they pass $1 billion. But Pielke spotted that there were no changes in the period 1980-2000, and a net annual increase of two between 2001 to 2023. The graph above, of course, is classic climate alarmist fodder. The discontinuity seen since 2008 is suggestive of a change in disaster accounting methods. “However, the lack of transparency into the creation of the dataset makes it impossible to know the reasons that may underlie this discontinuity,” concludes Pielke.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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A salient observation. Perhaps they should declare their interests in related branches of the trade, if it results in more use of legal processes!
The other (perhaps trivial) coincidence is that it is Guy Fawkes day in England on the same day as polling day across the pond.
I guess we all suffer to some extent when there is sloppy redefinition of anything, or using a word for more than one function rather than inventing a new, more precise, one. Consider the difference between Official Standards, Guidelines, Legal Requirements, optional compliance. When does it become a legal requirement to comply with this or that etc? Sometimes it depends on the practical outcome of an event, if it’s examined in an Inquiry of some kind.
“Remember, remember, the 5th of November….” – V
Underlying and overriding everything is, of course, Common Law, which is conveniently omitted by the article’s author (and most writers and lawyers).
Nice piece of reporting on the rotten to the core corruption of the vacuous, cackling puppet lady, complete with video explainer;
”KAMALA SOROS CORRUPTION: Kamala Harris as Attorney General refused to prosecute the George Soros owned OneWest Bank for over 1,000 violations of federal law. A one year investigation had uncovered evidence of widespread misconduct, but she refused to prosecute Soros and Mnuchin.
On March 19, 2009, a seven member investor group, IMB Holdco, led by Steven Mnuchin, which included billionaire George Soros, Christopher Flowers, John Paulson and Michael Dell purchased Independent National Mortgage Corporation (IndyMac Bank) of Pasadena, California for $13.65 billion from the FDIC and created OneWest from the remains of IndyMac.
In an internal memo published on Tuesday by The Intercept, prosecutors at the California attorney general’s office said they had found over a thousand violations of foreclosure laws by OneWest bank during that time, and predicted that further investigation would uncover many thousands more.
But the investigation into what the memo called “widespread misconduct” was closed after Harris’s office declined to file a civil enforcement action against the bank.
The previously undisclosed 2013 memo from top prosecutors in the state attorney general’s office alleges that OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.
George and Alex Soros continue to support Kamala Harris with millions of dollars. Alex Soros recently shared an image with Kamala Harris and wrote: “It’s time for us all to unite around Kamala Harris and beat Donald Trump. She is the best and most qualified candidate we have. Long live the American Dream!”
Elon Musk posted on September 17, 2023 “The Soros Organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of Western Civilization.” and posted on May 15, 2023 regarding George Soros “You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” Elon Musk is correct and that is why he joined President Trump in the fight for America and humanity.”
https://x.com/SpartaJustice/status/1833215615450194364
I’m sure we’re all aware of these desperate and obvious tactics already, with regards to the rushed mass immigration in the U.S, courtesy of the Biden-Harris government. They need the votes so the more illegal migrants they can legalize speedily the merrier;
”The publicly-stated goal by almost all leaders of the Democratic Party is to legalize the ~15 million illegal migrants as soon as possible, as well as bring in tens of millions more.
That would immediately make all swing states deep blue, just like happened in California with the 1986 amnesty, turning America into a permanent one-party state.
This is the last real election if Trump loses.”
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1833349210818920783
So easy for illegals to vote in the upcoming election;
”Here is how easy it is for illegal aliens to vote in U.S. elections.
This is an intentional flaw in the system. It is a loophole created to defeat election integrity.
That is why Arizona is being *SUED* to ensure that illegal aliens don’t register to vote in our elections.
The fact that nearly ALL Democrats oppose the SAVE Act to ensure illegal aliens don’t vote in our elections is the HUGE RED FLAG that this is an intentional design flaw that facilitates voter fra*d.”
https://x.com/kylenabecker/status/1833501427630497955
The quarter council (Bezirksverordnetenversammlung) of Berlin-Pankow has recently changed the bylaws for sports facilities to exclude members of the far right from the group of people being allowed to use them. That’s obviously based on a positivist interpretation of the nature of law, namely, law is whatever the people who can vote to create laws chose to make one and their power to create whichever laws they desire is only limited by their desire to legislate on something (Starmer’s proposed outdoor smoking ban would be another example of this category).
Under such a regime, individuals are in the fairly poor position of only being allowed to do what nobody has chosen to declare illegal so far and nobody can tell what will be declared illegal tomorrow. This could also be called slow motion totalitarianism: While the totality of everything is within the power of the law makers to regulate as they see fit, they haven’t yet gotten around to regulate a lot of things and individuals are thus still relatively free to do a lot of things (to wit: A ban on people speaking to other people they happen to meet in the streets was nominally in place during COVID).
Something like this can obviously not be called a free society. In a free society, the power of legislators to issue decrees must be limited according to some set of rules which respect Fuller’s inner morality of law and that’s how our political systems were supposed to work and did actually operate for a fairly long time. This only changed after Ferguson’s law (as in law of nature) “We will get away with it if we really want to!” was discovered in 2020.
The problem we’re facing is thus how to put the Ferguson positivists back into the place they were occupying prior to the Anything goes with COVID! outbreak. For this to be possible, we’ll need to neutralize their attempts to divide is into ever more splintered groups of factions warring for minor political advantages while being overseen by them.
It shall be interesting to see what caterpillars and beetles crawl out of the Kackler’s word-salad tonight.
I tend to find David’s essays too long to hold my interest but this one has been his best. It helped that I have a philosophy masters (mostly forgotten these days!), but I found it got to the essence of what’s been happening since “the madness” in a way that was genuinely enlightening. I’m sure this movement towards technocrat authoritarian rule has been building since the 90s, but it’s shown it’s hand in the last four years in a brazen, almost mocking way (think Khan) – for our own good, of course!
Have forwarded to my children
Perhaps David could write something on the difference between something being illegal and something being unlawful. It seems you can get away with acting unlawfully until you are dragged (expensively) to court. I think of unlawful arrest for example!
All these coincidences! I’m not sure I believe in coincidence any more!
If law is law only because it is possessed by an authority that can wield it, and that authority says it is law, has law become like fiat currency?
A piece of cotton paper or a piece of polymer has no intrinsic value. But if government says it has a value and everyone acts as if it does, it becomes money. What are the consequences if ‘law’ is thought of and used as such?