Reposted from Not A Lot Of People Know That
FEBRUARY 20, 2021
By Paul Homewood
Stewgreen has tracked down the NOAA climate disaster website, which the BBC used for their video yesterday.
It is evident just by looking at it that the whole thing is totally fraudulent. First a look at the map:
When a hurricane hits a populated stretch of coast, which is almost invariably, it is inevitable losses will be big. But while last year was a busy year for hurricanes, we do know that the frequency of US hurricanes has not been unusual in the last decade, and if anything the long term trend is down. (Though it is worth noting that the 1980s and 90s were below average, making the choice of 1980 as a start date statistically inappropriate):
However, the vast majority of these wrongly named “climate” disasters are either tornadoes, hailstorms or severe weather (which are almost all thunderstorm/tornado outbreaks).
Again, we know that tornado activity has declined significantly since the 1970s. But we are expected to believe that tornadoes and thunderstorms nowadays are far more catastrophic than in the past.
The answer to this riddle lies in how NOAA determine what a billion dollar disaster is. The key is this sentence:
The U.S. has sustained 285 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2020).
So, they rightly allow for inflation, but is that enough?
The simple truth is that Americans have much more “stuff” than they did back in the 1980. Bigger houses, more cars, latest technological gadgetry, expensive furniture and clothes, and all the rest of it.
If a house burns down, the cost of rebuilding it and replacing contents will have increased by much more than inflation since 1980.
The same goes for local infrastructure and services.
The best way to monitor this is by looking at GDP, not CPI, which says that $1 in 1980 is now worth $3.32:
GDP however has risen from $2857bn in 1980, to $21433bn in 2019, which is 7.3 times as big.
We can see the impact of rising wealth better by looking at constant GDP, which has been adjusted for CPI:
This index of GDP, which measures real growth, has jumped from $6.5 trillion in 1980 to $18.3 trillion, nearly trebling.
So when a billion dollar disaster in 1980 is equivalent to a $3 billion one now.
We can also look at house price trends. The chart below is deflated using CPI, so again reflects real prices, rather than monetary ones. It has risen from 81.78 to 134.88, a factor of 1.65:
Out of the twenty two billion dollar disasters last year, supposedly a record, nine were below $2 billion. There is absolutely no doubt at all that if they had occurred in 1980, none of them would have cost more than a billion.
Hurricanes
We can actually make a direct comparison between the 1985 hurricane season and last year; both had six hurricanes.
In 1985, only three of the hurricanes enter the list, with a total cost of $9bn. In comparison, all six of last year’s appear, plus Tropical Storm Eta, with a combined cost of $40.1. The average cost per hurricane has risen from $3bn to $5.7bn. This is strong evidence that it is increasing wealth which is driving the rising cost of disasters, not the impact of climate.
Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.
If one could find the data, I think it would be instructive to also look at the costs of a disaster that have increased far more than inflation – such as medical care for the injured, the cost of replacing/repairing a building (what with regulations and appropriate “gifts” to the union bosses and politicians), etc.
Serious question – is there anything illegal going on here?
Are the BBC breaching some broadcasting standard?
Is NOAA doing anything illegal?
There must be some way to discourage them.
The GOP should have defunded NOAA in the last decade. With the proliferation of meteorological companies and interest in meteorology, the era of big government should be over.
40 years ago water damaged cars, whiteware and the like were fixable at a reasonable cost as it was just about all mechanical, these days they are written off by the insurance companies as the cost to them of replacing control panels and wiring are higher than replacement. No wonder then that their costs are going sky high, but while that may be the case virtually all of them report decent profits which would indicate that their underwriting formula for losses versus premiums received works for them which is all they care about.
The rest is scare mongering by pressure groups.
Here is evidence of 50 years of failed apocalyptic disaster forecasts …
https://realclimatescience.com/fifty-years-of-failed-apocalyptic-forecasts/
Great for CTM and others to find these “Reality Check” articles and post them here at WATTS. The other side has abandoned all pretense of searching for actual and factual data and are going with only the CAGW religion.
You Americans must be very brave. The population of Florida has literally doubled since 1980. The elderly must be particularly brave running into the path of hurricanes. Oh, hold on, twice as many people, each having twice as much stuff. Looks like less death due to natural disasters, and each person is losing less of their stuff. Move along folks, nothing to see here, we’ll manufacture some new headlines for you next week.
“long term trend is down” This is why they began naming every low pressure system that moves across water from June to November, all the better to scare people.
I think I’m losing the plot…
I found that video almost as soon as it came out and I’m pretty positive it was tagged, as the BBC does with sizeable, boxy-square-shaped links to their ‘Topics’ sections of both:
Reality Check ##
and also, obviously,
Climate Change
Mr Trump used to have his own ‘Topic’.
Wasn’t he The Lucky One. Out here in the Real World it would be called stalking, harassment or trollery and if they persisted (they continue to obsess about him after 4 years) ‘someone’ would be behind bars by now.
## Reality Check is the BBC in-house version of a Fact Checker.
(Groan, I feel sick even vaguely recalling the dross that goes past there)
It’ll be where facebork get a lot of their ‘stuff’
No matter, the turkeys all lap it up, getting themselves nicely oven-ready for Christmas
But now, those links and plenty more are all gone and there is a very large blank space on that page – very unusual for the BBC :-/
Seems like they’re clutching at straws, the reality is, it’s much, much better than it was.
Biggest natural disaster today…. earthquakes.
Btw, some serious Guatemalan volcanic activity at the moment.
Taking coastal damage as just one example, not only are individual homes in the hurricanes’ paths more expensively designed w/r/t features and ft2, but there are a lot more of those McMansions being built (where they shouldn’t be).
Does using GDP account for more people living on the coast, as well as greater populations in places where other disasters are occuring?
Look at the associated deaths, not the cost to wealth. A life is a life – you can’t adjust it up or down. If the number of deaths is rising, we need to be concerned and take action (like better and more tornado shelters). If the number of deaths is falling, then we are already taking appropriate steps or severity of weather is decreasing.
New Orleans was an outlier – the deaths were mostly the result of stupid politicians and bureaucrats, and a city partially built under the sea level.
in 1900 could we see and report the storms we now count that form in the ocean and dissipate in a day or 2 without coming anywhere near land?
Nine Year Kerry sez the storms are gettin’ bigger and bigger….and more of ’em too….maybe a small benefit is windpower increase….and washes dirt off the solar panels….eh?…..and the exodus out of S. Florida in Teslas will be thing to behold.
When assessing the destructiveness of hurricanes, one has to also take into account the huge increase in the number of homes and people that are right on the coast.
Back in 1980, most of the seashores in the Eastern US were sparsely inhabited, although by then a multidecadal increase in such habitation had already started and was accelerating.
Go back a few decades prior to 1980, and the seashores had few year round residents.
Also, the southern belt of states, in particular Florida, used to be nearly uninhabited as compared to today.
The difference in Florida from when I first lived here for a Summer in 1977, was already dramatic when I moved here for college in 1982.
While I was in college, just during those years from 1882 to 1987, the area around north Tampa had explosive residential and commercial growth.
It was the beginning of the era of developers constructing entire communities all at once, which often had a population equivalent to a small city.
The first one I was aware of was Tampa Palms, where a dense housing community was built on what had been a uninhabited cattle ranch literally in the middle of nowhere.
Nowadays, such construction here is an everyday ongoing activity.
But back then, it was unheard of and more or less unprecedented.
It is true inflation has increased the value of goods and services and property, and also that people have on average far more stuff than in decades past, and much of that stuff is pricy.
Homes are on average larger…often far larger.
And places where people did not used to live in large numbers now have tens of millions of people…many of them directly in harms way from what are known to be devastating events which are known to recur on a regular basis.
There is probably not a single mile of coastline from Brownsville to Cape Hatteras that will not be struck directly by a hurricane over the next 100 years, and yet there are few stretches of that entire coastline that are not built up.
New Orleans is a town which has large sections of the city below sea level, and the city was flooded from a glancing blow from a hurricane. It sits in the most hurricane prone stretch of coastline in the entire world, maybe in the entire universe. And yet when it was wrecked, few even spoke of relocating the city instead of rebuilding it in place. Indeed it was rebuilt largely as it was, and although the levees and locks and flood control structures were vastly ungraded, they were not built to be able to save the city in the event of a direct hit from a powerful hurricane.
At a time when some were warning that hurricanes would be stronger in the future than ever, and that the ocean was going to rise ever faster, the city was rebuilt at a cost of many tens of billions of dollars, and was not even built while planning for the past, let alone the future.
Plus, half the crap that alarmists say is exaggerations and the other half is lies.
The sad thing is that this has been known for decades. I was doing hurricane modeling over three decades ago. Insurance companies are interested in total cost in nominal dollars, but it was considered obvious that when comparing years, one adjusts for both inflation and change in inventory of buildings. That’s a simplification, the actual modeling takes into consideration changes in building codes over time. Nominal costs go up due to inflation, nominal costs go up because people are building more on the coast, and go up a little less than the value of the buildings because of improved building codes.
Getting the details right was a lot of work but the concept was well-known. The fact that NOAA adjust for inflation but not anything else either means they are clueless or deliberately deceiving. I started to say lying, but is not lying because the values are not wrong they’re just misleading, because they want you to think that climate is responsible for more more damage. No, humans are responsible for more more damage because they are putting up buildings in the paths of hurricanes.
I also did some tornado modeling a little more recently, so yes I’m a very aware that the frequency of tornadoes is down and the severity is highly variable but there is no discernible trend up.
And don’t get me started on forest fires. Incompetent forest management is not a climate problem.
This Layman’s inflation equalizer is to take the reported value of something (a new house, a new car, the damage, wages etc,) in any given year, divide by 20. Then multiply by the price an ounce of gold today.
There was a time when a $20 gold piece, an ounce of gold, was only worth twenty dollars.
(Back in those days someone might make $10 a week and new car might cost “only” $200.)
I believe the NOAA should be required to describe what they think is the difference between a climate disaster and a weather disaster. All they have listed are weather-related disasters. Published research shows that bad weather phenomena have not grown more frequent since the beginning of the 20th Century (Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. and others, anyone?). This is just an example of the Federal government lying to you, again.
Simply the expanding bullseye effect, Lomborg has a really good chapter on this in his last book