The recent British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Science Focus publication “The US is now paying more than any other country for climate change damage, study suggests,” claims that the United States is “now paying more than any other country for climate change damage,” citing a study estimating $16.2 trillion in U.S. losses since 1990. This is a fabricated falsehood. Decades of peer-reviewed research on disaster losses show no detectable long-term trend in normalized weather-related losses attributable to human-caused climate change and the BBC is wrongly conflating weather with climate.
The BBC based its story on a study from researchers at Stanford University, who write “[c]limate change is causing measurable harm globally.” They admit that no research links loss and damages from extreme weather to climate change; a gap in knowledge they attempt to remedy by applying politically motivated, flawed social cost of carbon estimates to econometric models tying carbon dioxide emissions to aggregate economic output in simulations of what output might have been had the Earth not warmed slightly.
The study’s model-derived GDP estimates don’t, as the BBC story implies, represent documented observed damages. There is a critical distinction between econometric modeling and real-world loss data.
Roger Pielke Jr., Ph.D., in his 2023 comprehensive review “Climate Change and Disaster Losses,” surveyed the peer-reviewed normalization literature and found overwhelmingly that increases in reported disaster losses are explained by increased exposure, wealth, and development—not by climate change.
That is not a fringe claim. It reflects the dominant conclusion in existing scientific literature.
As Pielke explains in the abstract of his 2020 paper, understanding disaster losses requires separating climatic changes from societal changes. When losses are “normalized” to account for inflation, population growth, and expanded infrastructure, the upward trends largely disappear. His review examined 54 normalization studies published between 1998 and 2020 and found “little evidence to support claims that any part of the overall increase in global economic losses documented on climate time scales is attributable to human-caused changes in climate.”
Also in his publication, Pielke summarizes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) conclusion that “loss trends have not been conclusively attributed to anthropogenic climate change.” That statement alone directly contradicts the BBC’s framing.
The visual tables Pielke published in his 2023 review, particularly the normalization summary table (seen below,) demonstrate that across hurricanes, floods, extratropical storms, tornadoes, and wildfire, the majority of peer-reviewed studies report no detection of trends in normalized losses and no attribution to greenhouse gas emissions.
In fact, as updated through 2023, Pielke identifies 62 relevant normalization studies worldwide, and 61 of them make no claims of attribution. Normalization is essential because economic losses increase as societies become wealthier and more built out. A hurricane striking Florida today hits vastly more property than one striking the same coastline in 1950 or earlier. That does not mean the storm is stronger. It means there is more damage because more people have populated coastal areas and more real estate infrastructure exists there compared to decades before. Florida’s population was just over 2.7 million in 1950, but exceeded 23 million by 2024. The number of homes in Florida has grown from roughly 600,000 in 1950 to over 10 million today, leading to a much higher density of assets in high-risk coastal areas.
In a 2022 substack post, Pielke showed how different Miami beach has become in just under 100 years, and how much more infrastructure exists.
Pielke published a second peer-reviewed paper in 2024 in the scientific journal Nature, and included this graph below.
That downward trend is an overwhelming scientific fact against the position the BBC holds.
The BBC article’s trillions-of-dollars claim rests on counterfactual GDP modeling, not on normalized disaster loss data. It extrapolates temperature–GDP relationships and then assigns financial liability across countries. That approach assumes temperature deviations directly and measurably suppresses economic output in a way that compounds over decades. It does not isolate actual disaster damages; it models hypothetical economic worlds.
In contrast, normalization studies examine real disaster loss data adjusted for societal growth. When that is done, long-term trends largely vanish.
Pielke is explicit that the lack of detection or attribution in disaster losses does not deny climate change. It simply reflects what the empirical literature shows. There is no statistically robust signal in normalized disaster losses that can be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions.
This is entirely consistent with the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which continues to acknowledge large uncertainties in linking aggregate economic losses to anthropogenic climate change.
Observed normalized disaster losses do not support the claim that the United States is uniquely “paying more than any other country” due to climate change. The growth in economic losses over time is overwhelmingly explained by growth in wealth and exposure.
When peer-reviewed normalization studies are examined collectively, the pattern is clear. There is no detectable, attributable upward trend in disaster losses driven by greenhouse gas emissions.
In fact, U.S. GDP has grown considerably during the recent period of slight global warming. The opposite should be the case if climate change was causing multi-trillion dollar economic losses. In fact, the study can’t tie a single extreme weather event explicitly to human emissions or the losses that were incurred. The losses are all in computer simulations, not borne out in the real world.
Presenting trillion-dollar model outputs as settled economic fact is bad journalism and the BBC should be ashamed for presenting such easily falsified rubbish as fact. That’s the true disaster here.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
Who is in charge of the BBC? A board of directors? A few politicians?
Like all taxpayer funded media outlets, they’re run by a staff collective, in the classic style of the proletariat that Marx regarded as an exploited class under capitalism.
Government-appointed boards that are nominally responsible for the operation of these media in compliance with their charters for objectivity do bugger-all to manage the staff. They do what they like, impervious to discipline.
A very cozy arrangement, with taxpayers being the only uninvited participants.
Which is why PBS and NPR got defunded.
BBC cannot be defunded because of the UK television tax. All owners of televisions are required to pay a huge tax of nearly 170 pounds/year per set. This huge revenue stream goes directly to the BBC without any reasonable accountability for its use.
Canada does something similar. The state-owned CBC is directly subsidized by Parliamentary grant of $1.4 billion per year. Again, the only audit is by the government itself. CBC cannot be defunded unless another political party takes office from the current governing Liberals and strips the CBC of its Parliamentary grant.
Hence, the political biases of the CBC are obvious for ALL federal elections. The CBC doesn’t even pretend to honest news coverage – it doesn’t have to.
Exactly, and the next time Canadians will see balanced climate coverage by the CBC, it’ll be the first.
And that TV tax is extracted with the threat of actual imprisonment for non payment. They have “detector vans” that drive around the area identifying TV’s that aren’t licensed . All very Stalinist.
In 1926, the population of Florida was 1.3 million and, as pointed out, in 2026, it’s now >23 million.
And, in 1926, the population of the Indus Valley (Pakistan) was ~15 million, but it’s now 260 million.
More people, more housing, more businesses, more infrastructure . . . all in areas prone to extreme weather events.
So . . . when nasty weather hits, guess what? Well, yes, greater damage costs.
Anybody putting these greater costs down to catastrophic anthropogenic global warming . . . well, what a bunch of blind brain frozen common sense deficient f#cking idiots (and please excuse my French).
I sometimes listen to NPR when in areas without many channels- and I’m disgusted with it. If it actually gave both sides of issues- that would be fine- but it doesn’t. It’s anti Trump all day every day- when it’s not ranting about the climate emergency. I wonder how long it’ll stay in operation without OUR money. It’s probably legally a “non profit”- yet the guy who runs the Albany, NY NPR makes something like 300K/yr. I hope it goes bankrupt ASAP.
The wokerati.
and even if it was it doesn’t mean man’s actions had anything to do with the climate
It might be worth pointing out that US is not the biggest emitter of CO2, China is, by far. US emissions have actually declined in recent decades.
Easy to dismiss the BBC when the opening sentence is so obviously wrong.
They are probably referring to cumulative emissions, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
BBC is now selling poetic justice as science
where the biggest co2 emitter is also receiving the most co2 damage in return.
Now I wonder how the number of billionaires went up from 13 to almost 1000 since the start of of the AGW scare?
Shouldn’t there be a reverse trend or at least a stagnation in a country that has been punished so hard by climate catastrophe?
“That does not mean the storm is stronger. It means there is more damage because more people have populated coastal areas and more real estate infrastructure exists there compared to decades before.”
A perfect example is Hurricane Sandy. It wasn’t even a hurricane when it made landfall in the NY/NJ area, but was attributed to global warming. A Wikipedia article on Sandy states “One group of scientists estimated that the anthropogenic (human activity-driven) climate change was responsible for approximately 3.5 inches (8.9 cm) of sea level rise in New York, which permitted additional storm surge that caused approximately $8.1 billion out of the $60 billion in reported economic damage and to an extension of the flood zone to impact approximately 71,000 more people than would have been the case without it.”
That’s absurd. Three and a half inches? Even Kevin Trenberth, who promoted the idea that warming had influenced the storm, had to push back on the idea that the path of the storm, which was driven by a negative NAO Greenland blocking pattern, was because of an artificial kink in the jet stream because of climate change and the melting of Greenlandic ice.
That was in 2012. It will be nice when we finally just let weather be weather again.
What exactly is “climate change damage”? Is that the same as weather damage?
I don’t think it can be because as we all know, weather is not climate.
If you want to communicate meaningfully, you must adhere to the definitions. Otherwise all discussion devolves into selective opinion and propaganda every single time.
Use of the Trans-Reality Alarmist lexicon only gains the CAGW crowd unearned credibility.
To look at the budget for this disaster would be interesting. What amount of $$$$ went to Stanford as “overhead”? The researchers will have been paid well but I can’t think of any other benefits. The concept of “opportunity cost” comes floating by. 🙂
Good question. So I just looked it up. The 2025-2026 academic year Stanford research overhead charge is an additional 54%.
[“That downward trend is an overwhelming scientific fact against the position the BBC holds.”]
You can’t use facts against the BBC’s position !!!
If it’s on the BBC, it must be true; the BBC has a ‘charter’ & has employed pillars of society like …
Sex predators – Jimmy Savile, Russell Brand, Huw Edwards, Rolf Harris, Alan Freeman, Stuart Hall,& dozens more.
The BBC should be closed, but then it is still an organ of government, so it won’t be.
This story has both bad news and good news. The bad news is the BBC still up to its usual shenanigans. The good news is that with the www and sites like this one, their TV ‘journalism’ is increasingly irrelevant.
Naturally we can depend on the BBC to take a few marginal facts and blow them out of proportion, and if they’re largely inaccurate why would it worry? Like much of the mainstream media, it depends on funding from leftist governments and even more leftist eco-organizations to spread exaggerations and attribute every negative occurrence under the sun to man-made climate change. These are the reasons that over recent years climate alarmism has lost most of what little traction it ever had.
The BBC is disgraceful.
Hopeless propaganda for the ignorant masses. congrats
Well, having read that it is now clear who is paying myusernamereloaded/isthatright to spew it’s lies, it’s the bbc.
If only there were a more direct way to demonstrate “climate change”, like dramatically higher temperatures, for example.
“Presenting trillion-dollar model outputs as settled economic fact is bad journalism and the BBC should be ashamed for presenting such easily falsified rubbish as fact.”
It would be if journalism was their goal. But it’s not.
Look up “The Battle of Fallen Timbers”.
It’s called that because it took place in a forest that had been hit previously by a tornado.
0 economic damage because the area hadn’t been settled.
If that same tornado hit today it would cause severe economic damage in Maumee, Ohio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fallen_Timbers
BBC is thoughtlessly regurgitating findings from a Stanford University “research” paper. Read the Stanford professor’s biographical sketch. To the uninitiated reader, it is made to sound impressive. It really reflects Stanford‘s stupidity in hiring the guy. This is more evidence of the gangrenous ideological rot that has infected most modern universities. Stanford, formerly one of the left coast’s premier institutions, has gone totally woke and is a shell of its former self.
Did anyone else notice:
“Despite being the biggest carbon emitter, the US…”