As massive storms cause catastrophic – and catastrophically expensive – damage to the built infrastructure, a weird and unnecessary thing happens. Actually, it doesn’t just happen. People make it happen and then make it worse, kind of like global warming:
Although traditional statistical methods cannot quantify the influence of greenhouse gases on rising disaster costs, many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.
“A lot of these extremes are really ramped up,” said Adam Smith, the NOAA climatologist who has led the billion-dollar disaster project for more than a decade. “If you want to act like nothing’s happening or it’s minimal, that’s just not the case in what we’ve seen in these extreme events in the United States.”
In September, Smith experienced a billion-dollar disaster firsthand when Hurricane Helene’s record rainfall overflowed the rivers that run through Asheville, N.C., where NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information is located. Smith and the other NCEI employees survived the floods, but the agency’s trove of meteorological data, including the billion-dollar disaster website, was knocked offline and remained inaccessible for weeks.
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As the billion-dollar disaster tally climbs, the question grows more urgent: Is global warming to blame?
To answer that, it helps to first ask another question: What do scientists really mean when they say that global warming is causing a trend? For that matter, how does scientific knowledge get created in the first place? In the case of the billion-dollar disaster dataset, the answer begins with two self-described weather nerds at NOAA’s office in Asheville.
Come on people. There is no need to use one thing to confuse another. Unless you are trying to do that deliberately, in which case, not okay then.
The point becomes moot in the context of decades-earlier debates on whether it would be too expensive to do anything about global warming, and especially whether those amounts were alarmist. . As these get eclipsed by economic data adjustments and comparisons, the murky, cause-effect-correlation confusion sets in. It seems like a reasonable question to raise. But no more-perfect distraction has been designed than the billion-dollar disaster data set, other than the caveat farm itself where this story was harvested.