Increasing insurance premiums and insurance companies refusing coverage. They can point to increasing damage costs as published by the government. Once again, hurts the most vulnerable.
NOAA has been a headline hog for several years now. Their atonal green PR has been a major theme. Ultimately, credibility has left their building, like it has in so many other federal agencies.
Here is an example of an 1980 event that would be about $2.5B in 2024 dollars that does not appear in the current BDD tally:
"Fujita and Wakimoto (1981) provided extensive documentation of the 16 July 1980 derecho that produced widespread damage across large areas of Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. They indicated that this storm produced approximately $650 million in damage as it traversed the four-state region. Accounting for inflation (to 2003 dollars), this storm produced an estimated $1.3 billion in damage from strictly straight-line winds. This estimate exceeds many damage tallies from U.S. hurricanes and is larger than the inflation-adjusted damage estimates from all major tornadoes that have affected the U.S. since 1890 (Brooks and Doswell 2001). This single event illustrates that derecho damage can exceed the damage from most hurricanes and tornado events affecting the contiguous U.S."
The fort Lauderdale example shows your elitist perspective. Most losses are not insured losses or covered by the government program. Working-class people just bear the brunt. 25% of Americans can't read or write. And they don't have the insurance that I get. And they don't fill out the forms to get the government money.
It's impossible to do a precise job here. The best we can hope for is to be fair-minded and try to have errors in both directions and hope it averages out.
One thing is obvious to everyone with eyes and empathy. The number of large disasters and their severity is increasing.
The ridiculous arguments to try to dismiss what we can all see with our eyes, depends on crazy concepts like the number of hurricanes per year. Which depends most importantly on the immutable number of days in the year.
By all rational standards, those possible losses due to disasters are a triviality compared to the pervasive, deep & devastating losses due to carbon mitigation efforts (most of which are scams) justified by those supposed Climate Change disasters.
And even environmental damage caused by these possible climate related events are trivial compared to the damage to the environment caused by smothering vast land areas with solar panels, wind turbines and their long distance transmission lines. And biomass mining energy scams added severe land use effects. Add to that mining the immense amount of materials they require, typically 20X traditional energy sources per TWh of production. Likely upwards of 40X including battery/hydrogen energy storage and transmission lines/substations.
Allowing that outrage to continue, to the severe detriment of 99% of the population, is an elitist perspective on steroids.
I agree with that. In particular the suppression of any innovation in nuclear energy for half a century, 1975.
People are arguing about whether it's safe or effective to build antique cathedrals, And suggesting for that reason we can't build churches.
When nuclear modules are manufactured, on a production line, which has 5 years to streamline its supply chain, we'll have some idea what they would cost. Until then none of us know.
We have two parties in Washington. One represents the bankers and executives of the big companies that block progress. The other represents the labor of the big companies that block progress. I'm in favor of innovation. I don't have a party.
But as an engineer I know that nuclear energy could be made 10 times cheaper than today's grid prices. There's a half century of new technology, physics, and manufacturing technology that hasn't been applied. That would be great for industry. Great for human beings. Great for nature as we would take a huge load off of agriculture and could supply water to desiccated regions. But it might be bad for the worst utilities who worry about declining revenue for themselves.
So we need some political leadership that can overpower the utilities and get the industry and the people what they need- affordable reliable clean safe energy, sufficiently cheap to clean up environmental pollution and desalinate all the water we need.
Hi Sue, I certainly agree with this. Two responses:
1. Don't look at impacts to identify trends in extreme events, look at data on weather and climate extremes.
2. The factors that you raise (non-monetary impacts) are crucially important, however they will not appear in any economic tally, by definition, and are outside the focus of this analysis.
This post is much more about scientific integrity of a leading federal agency than anything to do with disasters per se.
I do see that many of the estimates they have made have huge error bars. But I don't see that they've made every estimate, biased in the same direction. There are lots of unknowables. Good researchers do their best, report the error bars, and when you have a whole bunch of uncertain things added together, if your mistakes aren't biased, the error bar on your cumulative total should be smaller than the error bars on the individual components.
Now I have seen fraudulent research, by large institutions, intended to prove that inexpensive drugs don't work as well as the new molecules they're getting ready to bring to market, for example. Where they have 30 things that are in some doubt, and in every single case they somehow make an interpretation or process choice that leads to an error in the same direction.
"But I don't see that they've made every estimate, biased in the same direction"
Surely possible ... I've provided the 18 versions here, do you see any evidence of methodological choices that are biased in the direction of diminishing counts of BDD?
Each of the flawed methodological choices I document here does bias in the same direction.
Outstanding in-depth review of these hidden data. I suspect NOAA is being guided by insurance industry lobbyists and social media. Many decades ago, disaster areas would be laid waste for years. Now vast sums of money pour in to rebuild and redevelop better than ever before, resulting in inflationary pressures and much higher premiums.
A quick query, Roger: your Fort Lauderdale Flood 2023 numbers total $744 including the $100M of public infrastructure. Yet you say that the total is "well less that $600 million, and less than half of the NOAA estimate ($1.133M)"
The bad cattitude substack has an excellent post on the funding & promoting of Climate Catastrophism in the MSM and political corruption. Also censorship of dissenting voices:
climate catastrophism as big business. green is all about the greenbacks:
Once again the old adage: Follow The Money, Find The Truth.
Zero doubt NOAA, like the FDA, CDC, NIH, NRC, FBI, CIA, DOJ, EPA have all been corrupted by the billionaire & trillionaire members of the Corporate/Bankster Establishment. This is an agenda. And its purpose is NOT environmental, it is geopolitical.
Thanks Roger. This reminds me of comments on 'cobbled together' Canadian disaster data a few years ago. Cat Tales, a newsletter from our insurance industry's Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction had a 2018 article entitled "Big Data? How About starting with just 'data'?" (see page 5: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aq_KPf5aesq81_JaKYe93LKaOIiQ3ptV/view?usp=drive_link). They wrote:
"Take disaster data for one. Systematically collected insured catastrophe data has only been collected in this country for about a decade. The cat data that goes back further than this, while helpful to show an overall tendency, has been cobbled together from various sources and is not very robust."
Cobbled together. Sounds familiar.
Some have advocated to get CPI adjustments included in the Canadian industry's loss trend charts. A good first step to assessing trends. Only recently has the federal government taken the next step of adjusting for growth and commenting on those trends. They have reported in the 2021 Changing Climate: National Issues report that "Costs associated with damage from extreme weather events in Canada are significant and rising, largely due to growing exposure and increasing asset values."
"Fortunately, science is self-correcting and NOAA is a leading science agency." Unfortunately, institutional -- especially governmental --factors that have developed over decades means that science is no longer self-correcting. Science is like the free market in that, when not interfered with, it adjusts and corrects. When you intervene in the system too heavily, that adjustment is compromised or destroyed.
Excellent post, sir. Thank you. A comment, and a question.
You concluded your paper with the statement, "Fortunately, science and policy are both self-correcting.” I beg to offer that all evidence is to the contrary! Were it so, there would be no reason for this post.
I believe in an earlier post you referenced a paper by Buntgen, "The Importance of Distinguishing Climate Science from Climate Activism." That was a good paper. NOAA's lethargy in responding to your questions of their integrity seems clearly to be a case of activism run amok. My question is, do you think or believe that conclusions of other agencies, such as the EPA's bans against fossil fuels, is similar evidence of such activism? Should "science" conduct similar investigations into those new regulations, or other regs that are aimed at "fighting" climate change? It's a war we won't win.
In other words, has the narrative on climate change grown so loud and so powerful that "science" can justify abandoning both its roots and its ability to reason?
In unrelated reading, I ran across a quote by Yuval Levin that succinctly sums up the current state of debate on climate: "The breakdown of political culture in our day is not a function of our having forgotten how to agree with each other but of our having forgotten how to disagree constructively."
A couple points:
1. Most people will only see the conclusion and not the underlying manipulation or any counterpoints.
2. Are you so sure your faith in NOAA isn’t misplaced? Not some of the people, but the institution and leadership?
Increasing insurance premiums and insurance companies refusing coverage. They can point to increasing damage costs as published by the government. Once again, hurts the most vulnerable.
NOAA has been a headline hog for several years now. Their atonal green PR has been a major theme. Ultimately, credibility has left their building, like it has in so many other federal agencies.
I’ll guess that the most likely future for the NOAA BDD tally will be with a climate advocacy group
I don’t think it is recoverable as a meaningful scientific dataset and NOAA is too good an agency to keep it around
Watch this space
Here is an example of an 1980 event that would be about $2.5B in 2024 dollars that does not appear in the current BDD tally:
"Fujita and Wakimoto (1981) provided extensive documentation of the 16 July 1980 derecho that produced widespread damage across large areas of Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. They indicated that this storm produced approximately $650 million in damage as it traversed the four-state region. Accounting for inflation (to 2003 dollars), this storm produced an estimated $1.3 billion in damage from strictly straight-line winds. This estimate exceeds many damage tallies from U.S. hurricanes and is larger than the inflation-adjusted damage estimates from all major tornadoes that have affected the U.S. since 1890 (Brooks and Doswell 2001). This single event illustrates that derecho damage can exceed the damage from most hurricanes and tornado events affecting the contiguous U.S."
Where is this info from? NOAA
https://www.weather.gov/dtx/1980derecho
There are many such events that somehow escaped NOAA's notice
And another billion dollar event from 1980
https://www.weather.gov/gid/1980GrandIslandTornadoes
Also found on the NOAA website
And another, 1980 AZ-CA floods
https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1980/1005/report.pdf
That is 3 which NOAA does not have for 1980
What a mess
We should also consider the losses of life and limb which are way down compared to historical records
No real mystery here.
The narrative requires ever bigger numbers, this is just a continuation of this.
Generally when caught, narrative control goes silent and hopes for it to go away.
Never apologize or revise.
Keep up the good work Roger.
The fort Lauderdale example shows your elitist perspective. Most losses are not insured losses or covered by the government program. Working-class people just bear the brunt. 25% of Americans can't read or write. And they don't have the insurance that I get. And they don't fill out the forms to get the government money.
It's impossible to do a precise job here. The best we can hope for is to be fair-minded and try to have errors in both directions and hope it averages out.
One thing is obvious to everyone with eyes and empathy. The number of large disasters and their severity is increasing.
The ridiculous arguments to try to dismiss what we can all see with our eyes, depends on crazy concepts like the number of hurricanes per year. Which depends most importantly on the immutable number of days in the year.
By all rational standards, those possible losses due to disasters are a triviality compared to the pervasive, deep & devastating losses due to carbon mitigation efforts (most of which are scams) justified by those supposed Climate Change disasters.
And even environmental damage caused by these possible climate related events are trivial compared to the damage to the environment caused by smothering vast land areas with solar panels, wind turbines and their long distance transmission lines. And biomass mining energy scams added severe land use effects. Add to that mining the immense amount of materials they require, typically 20X traditional energy sources per TWh of production. Likely upwards of 40X including battery/hydrogen energy storage and transmission lines/substations.
Allowing that outrage to continue, to the severe detriment of 99% of the population, is an elitist perspective on steroids.
I agree with that. In particular the suppression of any innovation in nuclear energy for half a century, 1975.
People are arguing about whether it's safe or effective to build antique cathedrals, And suggesting for that reason we can't build churches.
When nuclear modules are manufactured, on a production line, which has 5 years to streamline its supply chain, we'll have some idea what they would cost. Until then none of us know.
We have two parties in Washington. One represents the bankers and executives of the big companies that block progress. The other represents the labor of the big companies that block progress. I'm in favor of innovation. I don't have a party.
But as an engineer I know that nuclear energy could be made 10 times cheaper than today's grid prices. There's a half century of new technology, physics, and manufacturing technology that hasn't been applied. That would be great for industry. Great for human beings. Great for nature as we would take a huge load off of agriculture and could supply water to desiccated regions. But it might be bad for the worst utilities who worry about declining revenue for themselves.
So we need some political leadership that can overpower the utilities and get the industry and the people what they need- affordable reliable clean safe energy, sufficiently cheap to clean up environmental pollution and desalinate all the water we need.
If the data shows that hurricanes, tornados, floods are not actually increasing, i'm not sure how to square that with your comment?
It appears to me to be entirely "expanding bullseye" effect coupled with data manipulation exposed by Roger?
Hi Sue, I certainly agree with this. Two responses:
1. Don't look at impacts to identify trends in extreme events, look at data on weather and climate extremes.
2. The factors that you raise (non-monetary impacts) are crucially important, however they will not appear in any economic tally, by definition, and are outside the focus of this analysis.
This post is much more about scientific integrity of a leading federal agency than anything to do with disasters per se.
I do see that many of the estimates they have made have huge error bars. But I don't see that they've made every estimate, biased in the same direction. There are lots of unknowables. Good researchers do their best, report the error bars, and when you have a whole bunch of uncertain things added together, if your mistakes aren't biased, the error bar on your cumulative total should be smaller than the error bars on the individual components.
Now I have seen fraudulent research, by large institutions, intended to prove that inexpensive drugs don't work as well as the new molecules they're getting ready to bring to market, for example. Where they have 30 things that are in some doubt, and in every single case they somehow make an interpretation or process choice that leads to an error in the same direction.
Hi Sue,
"But I don't see that they've made every estimate, biased in the same direction"
Surely possible ... I've provided the 18 versions here, do you see any evidence of methodological choices that are biased in the direction of diminishing counts of BDD?
Each of the flawed methodological choices I document here does bias in the same direction.
I don't, though I'm open to the possibility.
Outstanding in-depth review of these hidden data. I suspect NOAA is being guided by insurance industry lobbyists and social media. Many decades ago, disaster areas would be laid waste for years. Now vast sums of money pour in to rebuild and redevelop better than ever before, resulting in inflationary pressures and much higher premiums.
Physics aside, the climate consensus industrial complex is a scam built on scams.
Whoops and apologies: my misread: I didn't see the "including" on the smaller numbers. So my corrected total ($540M) agrees with your statement.
Just caught this one, yes, we are on the same page!
I wrote too soon after my morning coffee. :-(
Ha! I do that all the time, coffee first ;-)
A quick query, Roger: your Fort Lauderdale Flood 2023 numbers total $744 including the $100M of public infrastructure. Yet you say that the total is "well less that $600 million, and less than half of the NOAA estimate ($1.133M)"
What has happened there?
Cheers,
Simon
Hi Simon,
204+236+100 = 540
The bad cattitude substack has an excellent post on the funding & promoting of Climate Catastrophism in the MSM and political corruption. Also censorship of dissenting voices:
climate catastrophism as big business. green is all about the greenbacks:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/climate-catastrophism-as-big-business
Once again the old adage: Follow The Money, Find The Truth.
Zero doubt NOAA, like the FDA, CDC, NIH, NRC, FBI, CIA, DOJ, EPA have all been corrupted by the billionaire & trillionaire members of the Corporate/Bankster Establishment. This is an agenda. And its purpose is NOT environmental, it is geopolitical.
Thanks Roger. This reminds me of comments on 'cobbled together' Canadian disaster data a few years ago. Cat Tales, a newsletter from our insurance industry's Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction had a 2018 article entitled "Big Data? How About starting with just 'data'?" (see page 5: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aq_KPf5aesq81_JaKYe93LKaOIiQ3ptV/view?usp=drive_link). They wrote:
"Take disaster data for one. Systematically collected insured catastrophe data has only been collected in this country for about a decade. The cat data that goes back further than this, while helpful to show an overall tendency, has been cobbled together from various sources and is not very robust."
Cobbled together. Sounds familiar.
Some have advocated to get CPI adjustments included in the Canadian industry's loss trend charts. A good first step to assessing trends. Only recently has the federal government taken the next step of adjusting for growth and commenting on those trends. They have reported in the 2021 Changing Climate: National Issues report that "Costs associated with damage from extreme weather events in Canada are significant and rising, largely due to growing exposure and increasing asset values."
(I have a brief blog post on the National Issues report: https://www.cityfloodmap.com/2021/06/national-issues-report-identifies.html)
Thanks again Roger.
"Fortunately, science is self-correcting and NOAA is a leading science agency." Unfortunately, institutional -- especially governmental --factors that have developed over decades means that science is no longer self-correcting. Science is like the free market in that, when not interfered with, it adjusts and corrects. When you intervene in the system too heavily, that adjustment is compromised or destroyed.
You are describing the change from a scientific to political organization. One seeks the truth, the other manages the narrative
Excellent post, sir. Thank you. A comment, and a question.
You concluded your paper with the statement, "Fortunately, science and policy are both self-correcting.” I beg to offer that all evidence is to the contrary! Were it so, there would be no reason for this post.
I believe in an earlier post you referenced a paper by Buntgen, "The Importance of Distinguishing Climate Science from Climate Activism." That was a good paper. NOAA's lethargy in responding to your questions of their integrity seems clearly to be a case of activism run amok. My question is, do you think or believe that conclusions of other agencies, such as the EPA's bans against fossil fuels, is similar evidence of such activism? Should "science" conduct similar investigations into those new regulations, or other regs that are aimed at "fighting" climate change? It's a war we won't win.
In other words, has the narrative on climate change grown so loud and so powerful that "science" can justify abandoning both its roots and its ability to reason?
In unrelated reading, I ran across a quote by Yuval Levin that succinctly sums up the current state of debate on climate: "The breakdown of political culture in our day is not a function of our having forgotten how to agree with each other but of our having forgotten how to disagree constructively."