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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They must have put the figures through a Neil Ferguson / Imperial College model.
My brother once said to me “Why would people say there is global warming if it isn’t true”? ——-This really is the most important question to answer. Why does anyone tell you something that isn’t true?—- They are trying to deceive you. They want you to believe something for a purpose. But the problem with climate change is that it isn’t a black and white issue. It isn’t the case that (a) there is global warming or (b) there isn’t any global warming. So when climate activists say something silly like “climate change is real and happening now”, they are making a statement that doesn’t really mean very much. Infact it means NOTHING. It is a bit like saying elephants dying is real and happening now. Which says nothing about the amount of elephants dying or whether this is unusual or what is causing them to die. Infact there may be nothing at all unusual about the amount of elephants dying, but the statement “elephants are dying ” is still true. It is just that it is totally misleading and deliberately so.—– You find this everywhere on the climate change issue with claims of certainty where there are NONE, and exaggerated and misleading claims, backed up by little in the way of evidence or context.—-Having no proof or evidence does not seem to matter so long as you stand at a podium in front of the worlds press and simply declare things. It all has this air of authority and the backing of “all the worlds scientists”. —–But I can name 20 scientists and experts in their field right now who will say the opposite and I can find another 50 very quickly in books I have read who will tear strips of the phony consensus. There has long been a symbiotic relationship between government and their scientists. They need each other. Government know that if they can convince people “all scientists agree” that people are likely to accept something, because most of them don’t dare question science. But we do not live in a scientific dictatorship where truth is simply pronounced. —–So my answer to my brother is this. Government are making claims about a dangerous climate crisis for political purposes and it is not that there isn’t any human influence on the world at all, it is just that global warming is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency with ZERO EVIDENCE for political purposes.
Agreed! As Einstein is supposed to have said (correctly in any event)
’No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong’
It is irrelevant how many scientists support a hypothesis / theory to make it true when one experiment can invalidate it. This is how the field of science progresses. It is a dynamic field of enquiry which invites rigorous review, otherwise it’s not science. You don’t have to be an expert in any scientific discipline to spot this!
Bullseye! If you can pick on an area which is very hard to actually define being so broad in its meaning and then tell people that it is doing something that is detrimental to their well-being, regardless of the reality, and have all sorts of ‘important’ people and important sounding organisations backing up these assertions plus a very compliant media, you have the recipe for total control of a narrative. Climate, as most of us on here would agree, is always changing and is almost impossible to truly understand. There are so many factors that affect it that we are still discovering. To think that humans can alter a global temperature through draconian measures that in actuality just limit freedoms, is the height of hubris. The people that sell these lies need to be arrested and tried before they spew any more of their garbage.
Yes —Climate is poorly understood. But most of the funding does not go to understanding it. It goes to looking for human influences on climate while ignoring natural variability. It is agenda driven science.
Excellent comment, varmint.
But I think we have to take it a step further if we are to be able to persuade (or at least sow a seed of doubt in) the propagandised people (like your brother). We need to postulate what these political purposes might be. And the argument that evil globalists want to impoverish and increase control over the masses is difficult to make since it requires complicity from our democratically-elected Parliament. Why would our Parliament deliberately impoverish the electorate and damage jobs?
I would be interested in thoughts…
Therein lies the problem, Michael. To even mention a global coup d’etat by a bunch of psychopathically-inclined globalists is to fall at the first fence even though Agenda 2030 is out in the open and accepted as a ‘thing’. We have to be very clever in how we frame these arguments and join all the dots because most people are still under the illusion that we live in a democracy and that the government works for them.
Well put, Aethelred. And even the oil and gas companies, like Shell and BP, go along with the narrative, seemingly penning their own obituaries.
I suggest western governments are all signed up to the Net Zero and Sustainable Development Agenda of reducing emissions and taking away affordable reliable energy because at UN level it has been decided that the wealthy west has used up more than its fair share of the fossil fuels in the ground in becoming prosperous and are to STOP doing that. All our politicians are fully onboard with this political agenda, as we saw in 2019 when no questions were asked as the NET ZERO Amendment to the Climate Change act was simply waved through. Not one question regarding the cost of this or its practicality was asked by any MP. ————-Yet the cost is estimated in the trillions and even Tony Blair whose government gave us the Climate Change act in 2008 has said that what we do here in the UK will not make the slightest difference to global climate. So why are we doing something at tremendous cost that will have no effect? ———–Because it isn’t and never was about the climate. The climate is simply the plausible excuse for the political Agenda called Sustainable Development.
“Sustainable development” is merely another way of describing the real Agenda, which as Maurice Strong, Chtistina Figueres and Otmar Edenhoffer all have admitted, is to destroy the economies of the West in the hope that this might somehow benefit the World’s poor. (Incidentally ignoring the obscene wealth of those actually governing the World’s poorest nations.)
Pielke Jnr. has a very good blog post called The Honest Broker. Recommended.
He is absolutely a genuine expert (something of a rarity today) in his field. He accepts the certainly unproven hypothesis that human CO2 emissions have, are and will change the climate.
It is likely that this acceptance by him is essential if he wishes to retain his appointment and the ability to publish his findings on the costs and consequences of his field, which he bestrides as a colossus.
As an old, long retired Engineer, I have no such restraint in expressing my view on “Climate Change”, which is that it has been going on since long before Homo Sapiens arrived and will contine to do so, probably within natural limits detectable in the Geology, long after we disappear. But I refuse to give any credence whatever to those who are so idiotic or so dishonest that they will never admit (despite clear evidence) of any benefit whatever, of a trivially warmer planet and a trivially more CO2 rich atmosphere.
There has never been a global climate utopia where earth’s climate has been stable and perfect for humans. It has been extremely worse in the past and never better. Earth’s climate has always changed. This really makes you wonder what is their goal? It can’t be to improve earth’s climate.