38 Comments

I’d like to see a 2023 pic

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They are prepping us for the same thing here. (Nebraska)

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Not really a surprise that there's a decline relative to GDP because the newer stuff in the way of the storms is built a lot sturdier than the other half of the stuff that took most of two centuries to build up.

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Not Always, Hurricane Ian in 2022 also hit Florida, mid strength, but it went through some marinas full of yachts and suddenly it’s multibillion$$.

Was it $10 billion?.

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Reasonable distinction. Some places are so rich they even put Ferraris in the way of storms.

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The point is two years in a row a hurricane hits Florida, i think both hit at cat3?

One is ~$1 billion, Ian was ~$10billion i think?

Is all about "where", the bullseye effect is all. If Ian took the same path in 1922, almost nothing to report.

We can all agree that NOAA is acting in a manner consistent with advocacy instead of science. They are part of narrative control, pure and simple.

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Touché. At least someone is paying attention. And there is no question that the Chinese know perfectly well that they have no intention of honoring the environmental commitments they are making. Hong Kong anyone?

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Jan 13·edited Jan 13

My analogy to the first graph, total losses, is personal taxes.

A graph of my personal taxes paid over the previous 30 years looks exactly like that.

Catastrophe!!!!

Yet, most of that change is due to making a lot more money.

Such a foolish thing to do;

“no good deed ever goes unpunished”.

Roger should make that his motto?

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Another confounding factor to consider is building codes in developed countries get stricter all the time. This is in part driven by insurance companies who don't want to pay out billion dollar losses.

For example there has been a drive in Canada over the past 2 decades to make buildings more earthquake proof even through we don't get the severe earthquakes occurring in other parts of the world.

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Lol. The clock tower in the lead photo seems to be the only thing UNchanged.

If 1) weather events are getting worse, and 2) causing more damages [both promoted by the climate "consensus"] wouldn't you expect insurance as a whole and reinsurance specifically, to have been bad stock investments since 1990?

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The alarmist answer would be climate change destroyed everything else in the picture allowing it to be rebuilt better.

Is that good or is it bad?

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And in other news, NASA declared 2023 to be the warmest in human history.

“NASA and NOAA’s global temperature report confirms what billions of people around the world experienced last year; we are facing a climate crisis,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “From extreme heat, to wildfires, to rising sea levels, we can see our Earth is changing."

This was of course picked up as a 10 second mention on the local news.

NASA's fight for relevancy takes them farther and farther from science

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It really is a shame that NOAA has lost it's way in the 'Whole of Government' race to be the very best cheerleader for !!! CLIMATE CHANGE !!! regardless of the actual facts.

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Jan 12Liked by Roger Pielke Jr.

I found the bullet point: "Can we conclude from this trend that climate change signals are not detectable in trends in various extreme events? No" to be a bit confusing. Are you really trying to say

"Can we conclude from this trend that climate change signals [are or are not] detectable in trends in various extreme events? No"

Frank

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author

I actually meant it as written. Maybe a bit convoluted, but the point is to look at climate data (not economic data) for evidence of trends or their absence.

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Jan 12Liked by Roger Pielke Jr.

OK, but as written it seems to say "You can't take this data as evidence that climate change signals are NOT detectable, but you COULD take it as evidence that it IS detectable. IOW, you have a boolean statement, but you are only covering one half of the solution space; you ruled out one side, but [deliberately??] left in the other half??

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author

Gotcha

These two questions and answers are intended to fully cover that space:

Can we conclude from this data that climate change is making disasters more frequent or costly? No

Can we conclude from this trend that climate change signals are not detectable in trends in various extreme events? No

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Love those pictures of Shanghai. I was there in 1985 and again in 2012.

I couldn't remember what was across the river in 1985, where all those massive buildings are now.

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Most excellent! Graphs like these are why I'm a subscriber.

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The developers of the commercial real estate in the Shanghai photos don't appear overly concerned about rising sea levels. What do the Chinese know that we don't know?

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They read the data

And The Honest Broker.

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Not to mention, China as a government is not overly concerned about climate. Nor are other countries governed by saner policies.

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Let us take a moment of silence to remember that the paper that was headlined "187 million flooded annually by 2100" did not include that number in its actual in-paper estimates, and the lowest estimate was 5000 - 10,000 with an adaptation cost of .2% of GDP

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Jan 12Liked by Roger Pielke Jr.

The graph of both losses and normalised losses starts in 1990. The graph trend implies normalised losses would have been higher historically. Is the insurance data in earlier decades prior to 1990 reliable enough to say cover the last century? How far into the past can the methodology be pushed?

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author

Great Q. Here is why I start in 1990, based on guidance from Munich Re about their data:

"According to Munich Re, since the mid-1990s, ‘there has been a distinct improvement in the reporting of overall losses’ (Munich Re Group, 2006). Thus, the analysis presented here utilizes the Munich Re dataset from 1990, recognizing that there may be some degree of under-reporting in earlier years of the time series (Mohleji & Pielke, 2014)."

https://doi.org/10.1080/17477891.2018.1540343

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Jan 12Liked by Roger Pielke Jr.

FWIW I don't think wildfires should be lumped in with floods and other "weather related" disasters. Weather is only one of many things that affect wildfires and there are human forces working to reduce damage in real time with varying success due to various factors. Imagine a hurricane-slowing technology.. or a real-time flood reduction technology. They don't exist. Wildfires are a different kettle of fish. IMHO.

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I think floods are the same, they are mostly caused by land use changes restricting run off. A rain event 100 years ago that would bear watching, in the same place today would be a catastrophic flood as the water is constricted to fewer channels and less and less open surface area to absorb it.

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Or 100 years ago dams and flood control channels might not have existed… or the existence of dams led people to build in floodplains. Complicated indeed to go backwards (or forwards for that matter). And not sure we had adequate weather records (coverage) in those days to compare in some places. A deeper question … why is “we really can’t be sure about contributions of cc” not an answer?

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Thank you! I've been trying to articulate that question for years now, and I always "get lost in the math." I've come to the conclusion that the issue (climate change) has become so emotionally-invested that logic and fact no longer control the response. I think Lindzen gave the most succinct, albeit indirect, factual answer to the question in his paper "An Oversimplified Picture of the Climate Behavior..." (https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-00471-z). But Mike Hulme (who Roger cites frequently) has argued that "climate change is not “a problem” waiting for “a solution...It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon that is reshaping the way we think about ourselves, about our societies and about humanity’s place on Earth."

A more flippant response might be, "you can always tell a farmer...but you can't tell him much."

Stay warm!

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Not sure how to answer your question

There is nothing more Lysenkoist than attribution “science”, basically ambulance chasers.

Regarding this site, I’ve stated my sympathy for Roger, he has caught many Phasor Blasts over the years and yet he’s still here poking his head over the parapet, trying to discuss data.

He reflexively raises shields all the time as a result, not sure how long that can go on.

“AGW is real and needs to be addressed, but we cannot detect it yet behind natural variation”.

I get whiplash every time I read a statement like that.

But he is trying

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My neck gets sore at that, too. But I've begun to take a different approach to his admonition - I choose to think he's saying before we go off half-cocked, we should figure out if AGW really matters by looking for a signal. If we can't find it should we stop looking? The way we "address" it is to continue to look for the signal in climate (not economic) data. I get irritated with the "net-zero" campaigns and their complete dissociation with reality. But I also think we need to continue to look for more efficient energy sources. It comes down to what your criteria are for "more efficient." In his statement, what does "addressed" mean, precisely?

Kind of babbling here - blizzard conditions outside have led to a "whiteout" in my mind!

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Jan 14Liked by Roger Pielke Jr.

And suddenly Alberta is under alert of imminent load shed and rolling blackouts as I type, -34C

They even used the emergency broadcast system to get everybody attention to turn off all unnecessary loads.

JFC

Heads need to roll.

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author

Be safe👍🙏

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I’d rather have the blizzard than the -40 i woke up to today in calgary.

Our net zero idiots want to try and force transition our grid far too fast and as far as I’m concerned they are the only existential threat I face here on the canadian prairies.

A grid collapse for days during a -35 outbreak would destroy the province and kill many.

The only thing I could imagine worse would be a large meteor hitting us

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I agree. For these types of analyses it is always much better to take phenomena one-by-one, rather than aggregate.

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Jan 12Liked by Roger Pielke Jr.

At 79, I have lost my ability to be surprised, Roger.

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Ha!

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