Where Have All The Disasters Gone?

I read today that the EU is using an estimate of US$68 per tonne of CO₂ emissions for the purported cost of the damages done by CO₂. This is known by a Newspeak term as the “Social Cost Of Carbon”.

It made me wonder—using this estimate, what is the overall total estimated damage done by humans from emitting CO₂?

The answer is $97 TRILLION dollars since 1950.

YIKES! That’s about five times the 2020 US Gross Domestic Product (the value of everything produced in the US during that year).

So I thought I’d take a look at the various largest weather-related disasters. I got the big-disaster data from Wikipedia here and arranged it by type of disaster. All values are in 2020 dollars, that is to say, they’re adjusted for inflation. Here is the result.

Hmmm … no matter how you slice it, that’s less than two trillion dollars …

Now, to be sure, there must be a variety of smaller disasters that didn’t make the list. So let’s be conservative, and call the disaster total four times that, or $8 trillion dollars.

To check that value, I looked at the EMDAT Disaster Database. It contains no less than 11,654 detailed records of flood, wildfire, drought, storm, and extreme temperature disasters since 1950. The smallest of these had damages of $4.6 million dollars ($0.0000046 trillion). So it’s catching even very small disasters.

In 2020 dollars, the EMDAT database says that the total cost of those disasters since 1950 is about $10 trillion dollars.

So let us make the obviously incorrect and untenable assumption that 100% of those disaster costs are ascribable to the evil influence of CO₂. It’s obviously not true by an order of magnitude or more, but let’s assume that each and every disaster is all 100% from CO₂ for the purposes of discussion.

And given even that incorrect and wildly exaggerated assumption, the obvious question is … where is the other $87 trillion dollars of purported CO₂ damages from weather-related disasters since 1950?

And it gets much worse if we don’t assume that 100% of the responsibility is due to CO₂. Suppose we say (still an exaggeration) that 10% of the responsibility comes from CO2. That would mean that we are missing, not $87 trillion in disasters, but $960 trillion in disasters …

(Let me say that this kind of error, of just picking a random goal like “Net-Zero 2050” or just calculating a value for something like the “Social Cost of Carbon” and not testing the result for reasonableness against real-world data, is far too common in the world of climate “science”. I discuss this issue about “Net-Zero 2050” in my post “Bright Green Impossibilities“.)

And to repeat … where are the missing $87 trillion dollars in damages purportedly caused by so-called “climate disasters”?

My best to all,

w.

AS ALWAYS: I ask that when you comment you quote the exact words you are discussing. I can defend my own words. I cannot defend your interpretation of my words. Thanks.