Worldwatch and Munich Re on Disaster Losses
June 4th, 2009Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Kudos to Worldwatch and Munich Re who today issued a press release on the growing toll of disasters around the world, and they studiously avoid making any statements about attribution to greenhouse gas emissions:
To a large extent this [increase] is due to socioeconomic developments, such as increasing concentrations of valuable property and infrastructure, rising population, and the settlement and industrialization of exposed areas. Climate change and the increase in major weather-related natural disasters that is expected as a result need to be considered as essential drivers of economic losses in the future.
June 4th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Hi Roger,
You must be feeling very mellow today.
You gave kudos to Worldwatch and Munich Re, even though their press release apparently states:
“Climate change and the increase in major weather-related natural disasters that is expected as a result need to be considered as essential drivers of economic losses in the future.”
If I recall correctly, you’ve repeatedly made the point that under no expected circumstances in the next several decades would climate change need to be considered as an essential driver of economic losses from hurricanes.
If I recall correctly, you’ve repeatedly pointed out that increasing property values near the ocean will overwhelm any increased cost from storm intensity increases from climate change (at least for the next several decades).
Best wishes,
Mark
June 4th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
-1-Mark
I’ve got no problem with their statement (except maybe an “is” that should be an “are”;-). Our Hohenkammer consensus concluded:
“For future decades the IPCC (2001) expects increases in the occurrence and/or intensity of some extreme events as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Such increases will further increase losses in the absence of disaster reduction measures.”
We also concluded:
“In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally.”
So their statement does not contradict either of these.
June 4th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Hi Roger,
My interpretation of this statement, “Climate change and the increase in major weather-related natural disasters that is expected as a result need to be considered as essential drivers of economic losses in the future.”
…is that the 50 percent or more (or at least 20 percent or more) of the economic losses in the future will be due to climate change.
I’ve briefly looked and haven’t found it, but I thought you did one or more posts wherein you essentially assumed some level of increasing intensity due to climate change, and showed that the increases in losses due to increases in property values at risk overwhelmed the increases in costs due to intensity changes.
Well, here I found a quote that I think refers to that work:
“But as I presented in Lamont, I am pretty sure that the debate – however it turns out – is not so significant from a policy perspective, that is even if one invents completely unrealistic scenarios for TC intensity increase, it would not dramatically change how we would evaluate alternative policies for hurricane damage mitigation – as I showed in my presentation and will be appearing soon in the literature.”
I don’t see how that statement of yours is really compatible with the Worldwatch/Munich Re statement:
“Climate change and the increase in major weather-related natural disasters that is expected as a result need to be considered as essential drivers of economic losses in the future.”
June 4th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
-3-Mark
The paper you are looking for is here:
Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2007. Future Economic Damage from Tropical Cyclones: Sensitivities to Societal and Climate Changes, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Vol. 365, No. 1860, pp. 1-13.
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2517-2007.14.pdf
I don’t have a problem with the statement.
I wonder where Brian Schmidt went?
June 4th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Hi Roger,
“The paper you are looking for is here:…”
Hmmm…interesting. The numbers for climate change are a much higher percentage of damage than I remembered. Perhaps you had some earlier numbers that didn’t extend so far into the future (i.e., 2050), and didn’t have such large intensity increases…? (It’s not critical…but I thought the numbers for climate change were less than 10 percent of total damage.)
“I don’t have a problem with the statement.”
Well, that statement isn’t so far from your 2050 projections. But I think you should have a problem with the statement, from a policy standpoint. The whole point of your paper was that efforts on hurricane damage reduction or containment should NOT focus on reducing CO2 emissions. I think virtually all readers of that statement will take it to mean that the policy path should be the exact opposite of the one you recommend. I think virtually all readers will take that statement to mean that CO2 reductions are the way to go to avoid future increases in hurricane damages.
P.S. Yes, I couldn’t resist the temptation to drop by Brian’s “Backseat Driving” blog to ask him when he was going to “reveal to his readers” why the GHF calculated values for climate-caused deaths from malaria, malnutrition, and diarrhea that were exactly twice the WHO values.