CNN Business posted an article titled “Climate change is costing the US $150 billion a year. Here’s what that looks like,” which cites a recent government climate report to claim that global warming is causing an increase in costly weather disasters. This is false. Data refutes the assertion that extreme weather is becoming more frequent or severe. As a result, climate change cannot be behind the rise in weather related damage. The real reason is a matter of demographics and economics, especially population growth and increased development in natural disaster-prone areas.
CNN claims that the United States experiences a weather event costing $1 billion in damage every three weeks, as opposed to “40 years ago, when extreme weather episodes that cost an inflation-adjusted $1 billion happened once every four months on average.” This figure comes from the Biden administration’s recent National Climate Assessment (NCA) report.
What CNN neglects to mention in their effort to tie rising disaster costs to climate change is that property values – both in the form of objects like houses, cars, and home goods, as well as land values – have increased over time. This obviously contributes to the rising costs of damages, with or without inflation factored in. In addition, more people than ever before insure their property, under various government backed flood, disaster, and crop insurance programs.
Coastal development has increased over time as well, and the total number of people (and their possessions) has also increased in the United States, particularly in states like Florida, Texas, and California, which are prone to natural disasters like hurricanes, severe droughts, and wildfires, all of which damage property. (See figure below)
Florida’s population, for example, has nearly doubled since 1983, putting an additional 10 million people in harm’s way when hurricanes strike there. Population and associated development has also increased in most other coastal locations and along attractive rivers and streams, meaning when hurricanes occur or rivers rise, more people are at ground zero for harm.
The Daily Caller interviewed University of Colorado professor and climate researcher Roger Pielke, Jr., who explained plainly that “[t]here is no peer reviewed science that attributes any part of increasing disaster losses to changes in climate,” says economic data is not a good metric for making claims about climate change, largely because of the economic conditions that change regardless of the weather.
CNN also says that the “cost of extreme weather events is expected to grow in the near term with a projected rise in sea levels and temperatures,” but this is more unsupported speculation. While it is true that sea levels have risen gradually since the end of the last glaciation, as discussed in Climate Realism post “Sorry, Washington Post, Climate Change Isn’t Worsening Hurricanes, but Storm-Resilient Military Bases Make Sense,” there is no evidence that sea level rise is making it so storms are more damaging. Also, as Climate Realism has pointed out many times, there is no data showing an increase in severe tropical cyclones.
Regarding the point on temperature, CNN does not elaborate on how higher temperatures will cause more costly damage, except that they say “agricultural losses” and “worker injuries” are counted among the NCA report’s damage calculations. This is nebulous at best, but crop production in the United States has been increasing over the same period of modest warming, and worker injuries don’t appear to be getting more common, according to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. (See figure below)
There has been no increase in heatwaves in the United States, either, with the most extreme recorded summer heat in U.S. history was during the 1930s, well before climate alarmists claim there was accelerated human-caused warming.
Weather and natural disasters certainly result in billions of dollars in cost each year, but using economic figures as proof of a climate catastrophe is misleading. Not only has extreme weather not become worse in the United States over time, but the NCA report and CNN both ignore myriad the other factors, like population growth and greater development, that result in higher damages costs now than in the past when extreme weather and other types of disasters strike.
Yet again proof that when people refuse accept lies from media, government and academia all three just tell bigger lies louder.
Desperation.
Almost all media groups climb on board with extra indefensible climate claims during climate meetings as part of the promotional period. It was most extreme and educational to see this pattern during the lead up to the Paris Agreement®️.
The tilting of Billion$ at windmills and other useless energy sources (Solar), as well as lost productivity, industrial job losses to overseas manufacturing and inflation brought about through the vilification of high density energy, has cost Trillions$ more than supposed Climate Change damages and has produced Net Zero effect on the weather
In fact, 2004 up to Dec31 2022 the $4.5T has been spent on just the renewables portion of fighting this nonexistent boogeyman with more than $4B being spent in 2023 by June 30. So easily over $5T by years end. And again, Net Zero to show for the bad investment
That $4B in 2023 should have been $450B in 2023 by mid year
“CNN does not elaborate on how higher temperatures will cause more costly damage”
Perhaps The Guardian can help?
“”Extreme weather could shut down one in 12 hospitals worldwide, report warns
Total of 16,245 hospitals at high risk by end of century unless fossil fuels phased out, analysts say
…
Our analysis shows that without a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, the risks to global health will be exacerbated further, as thousands of hospitals become unable to deliver services during crises.” Although some of the hospitals can be adapted to face the effects of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, severe storms, flooding and forest fires, many will have to be moved at great expense.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/02/extreme-weather-could-shut-down-one-in-12-hospitals-worldwide-report-warns
No, it can’t. It didn’t even bother to provide a link to the Cross Dependency Initiative (XDI) outfit behind this Earth shattering news. But here’s what they have to say about their “climate risk engines”:
“The Climate Risk Engines have driven innovation in defining, pricing and responding to physical climate risk.
The Climate Risk Engines extract dynamically downscaled global and regional climate change models and combine these with global and local data sets, applying bespoke probabilistic algorithms to produce decision-ready financial and risk metrics. Results are expressed in a range of engineering or financial metrics to inform decision-making at all scales.”
https://xdi.systems/about-us#climate-risk-engines
Results are expressed in the number of halfwits handing over large wadges of cash.
‘Climate risk engines’ – you don’t need to know how they work, leave that to us and we will also tell you what it means for you so you know how to deal with it. Now about the cost…….
Climate Risk Engines violate
the Second Law of Thermodynamicsthe first Law of Logic*.*Best paraphrased by Richard Feynman: “The first principle is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
In reality, what might shut down hospitals is if they lack reliable energy sources in order to function. No fossil fuels to generate power and heat – your average hospital will look more and more like the field hospitals in the tv show MASH! Hopefully there would be no bombs going off nearby, but they would have flickering lights – and times with no light – doctors doing surgery by flashlight and hand “bagging” (ventilating) patients.
Ah, very nice article! I was still stuck at how attribution scientists have “proven” that their studies can detect climate change signals in local extreme weather patterns and how that whole proof must be wrong as there is no climate signal for extreme weather.
But writing this I realize that models could indeed have such signals.
Regardless it is another example where climate scientists get it wrong – again.
However, this article makes a very important point for the political consequences of Alimonti´s findings!
Uh and in this context I would like to mention again the
climate scientists successfully censoring a peer reviewed and published article by Alimonti et al. earlier this year, circumventing the scientific process like it was done by the catholic church in the middle age:
The names of these people are:
Greg Holland, Lisa Alexander, Steve Sherwood, Michael Mann, Richard Betts, Friederike Otto, Stefan Rahmstorf and Peter Cox
Details of the story can be found here:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/think-of-the-implications-of-publishing
If a story like that was made up in a novel I would discard that book as far stretched outer worldly trash, especially given that at least three of those names should tippie toe very carefully IMHO when it comes to scientific achievements and ethics. Oh, they won the prices, but did they deserve any of them?
There’s a lot of misapplied statistics in Climate Science. What annoys me most is when researchers are able to sift through 30 years of data and demonstrate a worrying increase in 50 year weather events.
Always with the exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies. Why? Why aren’t facts good enough?
not for cultists
Their goal is to cost the world trillions due to climate mania. Xi Jinping and his family are heavily into EV production….the Chinese are heavily subsidizing EV production and want to dominate EV sales worldwide.
$200 trillion estimated by Bloomberg to stop warming by 2020.
scv
You mean by 2050; which is still a fantasy.
And the McKinsey Company [consulting] reviewed the NetZero by 2050 and came up with
~ $270 Trillion (USD) for the world. So, about $9T per year.
One guess as to who is expected to pay for most of it!
https://www.scribd.com/document/555773648/McKinsey-The-Net-Zero-Transition-What-It-Would-Cost-What-It-Could-Bring-250122
But it’s worse: the trillions need to be spent early [front-loaded] so there is time for the magical devices that have yet to be invented or demonstrated at scale will have time to work.
It’s like building the Starship Enterprise now and hope that someone invents a warp drive before you finish. Magical thinking!`
OK, it’s time for a change. CNN used to be the Clinton News Network, then morphed into the Communist News Network, now they are all in for the Climate News Network.
I thought they kept the same name throughout? The Crap News Network.
I think of other words beginning with “c”.
“This figure comes from the Biden administration’s recent National Climate Assessment (NCA) report.”
The Biden administration is doing more damage in 4 years to the USA than all the weather events have done since the Indigenous peoples of the Americas arrived many centuries ago.
The printed material from Biden’s minions takes perfectly good paper and destroys it. Roll it up into fire-place-sized logs and burn it. Best use, 97% sure.
If “climate change” is to include the long-term trend of global warming, and discounting for the sake of this argument the following periods:
— a 1880-1913 global cooling (a 33-year interval), and
— a 1946-1976 global cooling (a 30 year interval), and
— a 2004-2023 global warming “pause” (an 8+year interval),
then one must offset claimed “costs” of such warming by the benefits (i.e., $ savings) engendered by longer agricultural growing seasons and reductions in excesses cold-related deaths due to such climate change.
Oh, and I also should mention that some climate alarmists would like to lump increasing atmospheric CO2 levels as part of “climate change” (in reality, its not) . . . in which case I will just point out that the 10-20% of “greening of Earth” over the last 20 or so years—which both NASA and NOAA admit is directly due to rising levels of CO2, aka plant food, in Earth’s atmosphere—has resulted in “no cost” additional yields of food crop harvests and growth of forests, just when humanity needs them most!
The need to use “monetary losses” in place of actual hurricane, tornado and flood data should be an obvious red flag to even the dullest person.
No fair introducing real data and common sense to the discussion. Makes the official narrative look weaker and weaker.
“Data refutes the assertion that extreme weather is becoming more frequent or severe.”
Tony Heller tells us this every day- day after day after day- if only the climate nut jobs paid attention to Tony- if they disagree, they can say why.
Increased population is indeed a main cause in supposed climate related damages. It’s only logical (unless you are Joe Biden or many of his lackeys) that having more people in the path of disasters will result in more damages. I have no doubt at all that the Native Americans who were the only residents of the Americas had plenty of experience with tornados, hurricanes (that word comes from the name of a god of the winds), fires (caused by humans and lightening), earthquakes, mudslides and volcanism long before Europeans ever set foot here.
But there were far fewer of them, many tribes were nomadic, and none of them kept written records of weather phenomena. I guess that’s like the old “tree falling in the forest” notion…..if there were fewer humans around, and no one kept written records, was there actually any bad weather around back then? No one around to record it, and fewer around to see it, therefore it didn’t happen.
My thoughts with regards to those who choose to live in areas prone to natural disasters is this: You are accepting the risk to live in those areas, and therefore it is your responsibility to deal with and plan for those risks. Kind of like a skydiver who must prepare his parachutes as best he can, and do everything to ensure safety. But, because such a sport is inherently dangerous, he must accept those risks and not try to blame others for his choice if something goes wrong.
People who chose to live in disaster prone areas ignore the implications of their choice and instead blame it on “climate change”. Kind of like many ancient civilizations blamed bad weather on angry gods, curses, witches and other supernatural things.
At the level of climate alarmists’ intellectual sophistication, we can say,
1. Along with global warming in the last century, the has been a a parallel massive increase in food production.
2. We conclude, therefore, that global warming causes and will continue to cause a massive rise in food available to feed people.
3. Since we know that anything associated with global warming is bad, we must be concerned that an excess of food will lead to food price deflation, a hardship on farmers, a distressing outcome.
4. Also with so much food availability, too few people will starve, leading to too many people remaining alive, another distressing outcome.
kw
Maybe Global Warming is causing the obesity epidemic! /s
Jonathon Turley opines about Journalistic objectivity:
I have long been a critic of what I called “advocacy journalism” as it began to emerge in journalism schools. These schools encourage students to use their “lived expertise” and to “leave[] neutrality behind.” Instead, of neutrality, they are pushing “solidarity [as] ‘a commitment to social justice that translates into action.’”
For example, we previously discussed the release of the results of interviews with over 75 media leaders by former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward. They concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”
Saying that “Objectivity has got to go” is, of course, liberating. You can dispense with the necessities of neutrality and balance. You can cater to your “base” like columnists and opinion writers. Sharing the opposing view is now dismissed as “bothsidesism.” Done. No need to give credence to opposing views. It is a familiar reality for those of us in higher education, which has been increasingly intolerant of opposing or dissenting views.
Downie recounted how news leaders today
There was a time when all journalists shared a common “identity” as professionals who were able to separate their own bias and values from the reporting of the news.
the “atmospheric river” the media here is on and on about was just a few hours of relatively heavy rain yesterday. Nothing to write home about. If there was any flooding, it was due to drains blocked with fallen leaves.
And yet the original article threw the words “inflation-adjusted $” as though it corrected for population, house size and electronics. Damage cost and longevity…. Poor proxies for anything.