>But more importantly, this needs to be as a percentage of the total infrastructure (or real estate to make it easier to compute) in the area.
>IIUC as a percentage of total real estate value the amount of damage has been going down over time, as one would expect.
You could plausibly tell a story with the absolute numbers though. For instance, if people are increasingly building and/or moving to disaster-prone places, that would still be bad, even if damage as an absolute % is lower. However, after reading the article and skimming the site it seems like the general narrative that they want to push isn't that, and is instead something along the lines of "climate change is real and is causing so much harm, look at all these disasters!". I believe in climate change and think it's causing serious problems, but I'm also against shoddy reporting, even if it's for an agenda that I support in principle.
Wouldn’t adjusting historical values for inflation actually increase the magnitude of the numbers? Eg $100 in 1980s is $300 in 2023 (or whatever, not real numbers) - the number is larger, not smaller.
If there are several different metrics which you could plausibly report for a situation, then you use the one(s) for which the measured values are the best fit to your agenda.
Because total dollar cost is dominated by major hurricanes, which are rare, therefore any underlying trend would be invisible under the stochastic noise.
Frequency at a moderate severity level is much more stable and can give better insight.
As other posters already pointed out, the severity of the events should be adjusted for inflation, building characteristics, and total exposure.
Prices of things being destroyed goes up because of inflation, density of things being destroyed goes up because of population expansion. Unsure if anyone's keeping track, but Florida has had mighty large population inflows for years.
Florida is also the worst state in the country as far as natural disasters go. Most of the state’s real estate is completely uninsurable and has to be backstopped by the National Flood Insurance Program which tax payers have to bail out every few years.
Diffusing the insurance bill like this not only helps win votes in a swing state, it lets people pretend that global warming isn’t an issue and never will be an issue for a few years longer.
It's easy to criticize Florida, but California is also essentially uninsurable for earthquake risks even with government subsidies. While insurance is technically available, very few homeowners purchase it because it's just pointless. Premiums are high and if the big one hits we won't get much. Everyone sort of implicitly assumes that in a real disaster the federal and state governments will bail us out somehow even if we're uninsured.
And now some parts of California are also becoming uninsurable for wildfire risks. More and more homeowners are switching to government subsidized minimal coverage plans as commercial insurers increasingly refuse to write.
What we'll probably end up doing in Florida, California, and other vulnerable states is further tightening building codes so that structures are more resilient to natural disasters. Better to build something durable than to use insurance money to rebuild after every major disaster. The downside is that this will make housing even more expensive in areas where there are already critical shortages.
It's low lying and, geographically, is pretty much a magnet for hurricanes. Even aside from what I find is a miserable climate, I couldn't imagine moving there absent really compelling reasons.
As weather disasters dollar figures are directly correlated with housing, CPI isn't even close to a proper adjustment. CPI says the house my mom bought in 1994 for $114,000 should be $239,000 today. It's worth about $1.2M...
Interesting how a few people look at the graphs witch spike quite strong (much more than just a.few percent) and indicate that this is absolutely normal and has nothing to do with climate change.
Make out of it whatever you like, science tells us that climate change will erode our infrastructure and it will cost more than not doing anything.
Climate change denial has fluently shifted from outright refusal to accept the reality of an impending catastrophic change in climate - to refusing to accept human origins of the change.
It now goes along the lines of “weather has always fluctuated dramatically since the ancient times and this is no different” without skipping a beat or admitting to pushing a counter-productive agenda for the last 20 years.
I wouldn't call myself a denier, but I've gone from accepting the science to mostly hoping it is in fact wrong because it doesn't look like humanity will be letting off the metaphorical accelerator pedal (not this year, maybe one of the next few years will see an actual decrease in carbon emissions?). What else is there but to hope it isn't so bad?
Readit News
But more importantly, this needs to be as a percentage of the total infrastructure (or real estate to make it easier to compute) in the area.
IIUC as a percentage of total real estate value the amount of damage has been going down over time, as one would expect.
>IIUC as a percentage of total real estate value the amount of damage has been going down over time, as one would expect.
You could plausibly tell a story with the absolute numbers though. For instance, if people are increasingly building and/or moving to disaster-prone places, that would still be bad, even if damage as an absolute % is lower. However, after reading the article and skimming the site it seems like the general narrative that they want to push isn't that, and is instead something along the lines of "climate change is real and is causing so much harm, look at all these disasters!". I believe in climate change and think it's causing serious problems, but I'm also against shoddy reporting, even if it's for an agenda that I support in principle.
Frequency at a moderate severity level is much more stable and can give better insight.
As other posters already pointed out, the severity of the events should be adjusted for inflation, building characteristics, and total exposure.
Which should not pay to rebuild there. Sure, pay to relocate/rebuild somewhere insurable.
And now some parts of California are also becoming uninsurable for wildfire risks. More and more homeowners are switching to government subsidized minimal coverage plans as commercial insurers increasingly refuse to write.
What we'll probably end up doing in Florida, California, and other vulnerable states is further tightening building codes so that structures are more resilient to natural disasters. Better to build something durable than to use insurance money to rebuild after every major disaster. The downside is that this will make housing even more expensive in areas where there are already critical shortages.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/
No, not "curiously". More like "maliciously"
Make out of it whatever you like, science tells us that climate change will erode our infrastructure and it will cost more than not doing anything.
It now goes along the lines of “weather has always fluctuated dramatically since the ancient times and this is no different” without skipping a beat or admitting to pushing a counter-productive agenda for the last 20 years.
An extraordinarily big catastrophe would probably hold the record for a few years until the next above average events happen.
Our problem seems to be that the underlying distribution shifts fast. What once was a catastrophic freak event, is now barely average.
15% of all their incredible trees were destroyed.