From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
A recent article in UnHerd by John Rapley, in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, claimed that climate change has intensified extreme weather and increased the economic cost of weather disasters.
To quote:
“The American economy is ill-prepared for the rising frequency and intensity of such compound weather events. Of the 10 costliest extreme weather events to have ever happened in the US, six occurred in the last decade, the result of climate change intensifying weather patterns.”
https://unherd.com/newsroom/will-extreme-weather-events-break-the-us-financial-system
Is there any of evidence of this assertion though?
Far from Hurricane Milton being the storm of the century, as widely alleged in the media, it was no more than a middling Cat 3 storm, a run of the mill event as far as Florida is concerned. In terms of intensity, it ranked only 75th strongest in US recorded history.
It was the third hurricane to hit Florida this year, following Debby and Helene, but there is nothing unusual about this. Moreover, the official record dating back to 1851 provides no evidence of hurricanes becoming more frequent:
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.html
Also, the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded in their annual review of hurricanes earlier this year that “there is no strong evidence of century scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. “
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes
So, if hurricanes are not getting more frequent or powerful, why are economic losses increasing?
Simply because as a society and as individuals, we have more stuff to lose. The population of Florida has exploded over the years, particularly in coastal areas, which are most vulnerable to hurricanes. That means more homes and infrastructure.
And as they become wealthier, people own more assets. They no longer live in wooden cabins, but luxury homes. They own cars, the latest electronic gadgets and designer clothes. On top of that, rising real wages mean that repairing the damage from a hurricane will now cost considerably more than in the past.
A weather disaster that may have cost $500 million thirty years could cost a billion now, even when the effects of inflation are allowed for.
Professor Roger Pielke Jr is one of the leading experts on the cost of disasters, having studied the topic for thirty years or more. A recent peer-reviewed study of his found that when changes in asset values are factored in, what he refers to as “normalised”, there is no long-term trend in losses from Atlantic hurricanes hitting the US.
Katrina stands out as the costliest in recent times, but even that did not compare with the 1926 “Miami” Hurricane, which effectively wiped the city off the map:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-media-wont-tell-you-about
Pielke also looked at losses from floods and tornadoes in the US, and both show a marked decline in losses.
Another Pielke study analysed global weather losses, of which he reckons 60% are accounted for by US hurricanes! When measured as a percentage of GDP, the long-term trend is down:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/dont-believe-the-hype?utm_source=publication-search
Rapley makes the mistake of relying on NOAA’s Billion Dollar Disaster Database, which does not take account of increasing wealth and GDP. Instead, economic losses are only adjusted for CPI.
Indeed, another peer-reviewed paper by Pielke this year has described the NOAA database as flawed and misleading.
America has always been ravaged by hurricanes and other weather disasters. But it now has the resources, technology and money to bounce back from them.
A nation that had to deal with the Miami hurricane or Katrina can surely cope with a Milton.
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The only things increasing costs associated with storms are …
Population Density
Growth and
Inflation
I am at a loss to understand why people willingly choose to live in areas where they know they are at high risk of being hit by severe weather events sooner or later like hurricanes, floods, etc. The media always looks sympathetically on them of course without ever bringing up this subject. I guess they consider it cold-blooded, and the word “stupidity” is never to be uttered.
And when populations and land development in high-risk zones increases, it is always CO2-induced climate change that is responsible for the increasing damage and rising recovery costs from disasters. No one dare look at or discuss what the head posting here says. It is heresy.
Local politicians won’t stand in the way of all this high-risk development because it means more property tax dollars in their coffers. The money is more important than common sense.
One thing that my father said to me that I still remember is: “Never build on a flood plain”.
That probably includes barrier islands, and the rivers and creeks in the valleys of western NC. etc.
Yet they build, rebuild, and rebuild again in the Mississippi flood plains and taxpayer dollars fund a ton of that.
Sounds good in theory, but actual human development has always centered on flood plains – whether seacoast bays and harbors, large lakes (like our Great Lakes), and riverfronts that serve as major navigable waterways. It’s the most valuable land.
Cities mitigate the risks in a variety of ways … such as going vertical, building levies and other flood protection structures, building flood control dams, etc.
People like to live near to or within reach of the sea
I’ve read that early colonials in New England avoided living near the coast- to avoid storms and the natives who once had villages all along the coast.
Kind of baked in to our psyche from hunter gatherer times. The sea represented food abundance and tribe prosperity. Food could always be traded with inland tribes for other things not found at the coast. Who wouldn’t want to live close to your food source?
why people willingly choose to live in areas where they know they are at high risk
Or earthquakes – but then where does that leave?
That’s a real question – where can you go where there’s not a fairly decent risk of nature happening? And then what are the benefits of living in the high risk areas, vs the downsides of the low-risk areas? (The only places I can think of that would be fairly low risk are landlocked)
Or tornadoes and thunderstorms, or blizzards. Or drought or too wet. It’s always something.
People choose to do that because waterfront properties are the most desirable of all real estate locations, and that’s been the case for centuries. That’s why all the biggest cities have historically located on waterways of some kind (ocean, bay, river, large lake) which is always the cheapest mode of transporting goods and raw materials, and personal transit. That holds even for inland cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, and Pittsburg. It was only the advent of railroads and then eventually motorized highways that even allowed significant economic development to take place away from waterfronts.
Secondarily, waterfront properties provide the highest value viewscapes, along with the fact that water based recreation (beaches, swimming, boating, diving, fishing, and just plain hanging out) is also valued extremely highly by most people. People just like to look at water, and play or hang out in or by the water. Even going back to ancient times, Roman emperors tended to maintain villas on the Italian coast (like Capri) which were their getaways from the mundane lifestyle and evil smells and sights in the City of Rome itself.
Take two identical building lots – one inland where one cannot see or recreate in the water from one’s back door … and the other a waterfront property, and the value of the waterfront property will be many multiples of the non-waterfront property.
You may not understand it, but that’s how its always been. And as populations increase, cities and suburbs can in most cases expand outward into undeveloped real estate … but cannot create new waterfront property. Scarcity makes value.
You vote for politicians whose policies encourage inflation and guess what. You get inflation.
A house destroyed by severe weather in 2024 is no different than a house destroyed by severe weather in 1938. The only difference is the price you pay in regulatory permits, labor and materials to rebuild.
It’s much more than permitting costs. Homes being built this decade are far larger than they used to be 80-100 years ago. People want more space, and buyers want and expect more features, such as air conditioning (as little as 60 years ago hardly anybody had an airconditioned home), modern data and sound systems, hobby rooms, home offices, etc.
Construction costs are much higher, but that is for a variety of reasons – including the features I mentioned, as well as standards of construction for resistance to storms, earthquakes, termites, accessibility, etc etc. Mortgage interest rates have also varied wildly over the decades, being moderately high now, but still quite a bit less than the double digit mortgage rates experienced between the late 1970s and the 1990s.
Just more trash talk from the other side.
Current temperatures near the surface in southern Greenland.
Run away! Run away!
Greenland’s glaciers are melting and quickly flooding the ocean.
Expect tsunamis at any moment!
And don’t breathe while you run. You will emit CO2 if you breathe.
What is the evidence that only Man’s CO2 is making storms stronger (if they are really getting stronger at all)?
Economic damage has nothing to do with the actual strength of a storm.
There are more named storms now than before we started routinely naming storms.
What does that prove regarding Man’s CO2 causing storms to be stronger?