Recycled Nonsense on Disaster Losses
January 22nd, 2007Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
If you want an example of the sort of scientific exaggeration that should concern both scientists and advocates involved in the climate debate (but typically goes uncorrected), next week’s Newsweek magazine has an article on the growing tab of disaster losses, which it attributes to global warming.
Around the country, [insurance] companies have been racking up record property losses from freakish weather, such as the ice storms last week that paralyzed much of the Great Plains and froze California’s citrus crops. In recent years, wildfires in the Northwest, drought and hail in the Midwest, windstorms, lightning strikes on power grids, soil subsidence and other calamities of nature have led to cumulative property losses that exceed those caused by hurricanes. “There’s a shift going on to more frequent, extreme weather events,” says Evan Mills, an environmental scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “It’s as much an issue in the heartland as on the coast.”
Global warming is the culprit, claim many—including several insurers who are canceling policies. While scientists cannot determine whether a single weather event is caused by a natural cycle, or is evidence of more permanent, malignant climate change, the pattern of mounting losses is clear. According to Mills, weather-related catastrophe losses have increased from about $1 billion a year in the 1970s to an average of $17 billion a year over the past decade. In 2005, the year of Katrina, that figure reached $71 billion.
We have interacted with Evan Mills before, and despite having his work throughly debunked and the existence of an expert workshop report on the topic cosponsored by Munich Re, he continues to fundamentally misrepresent the state of the science to suggest that comparing disaster losses unadjusted for societal change from the 1970s to the present says something about global warming. It does not. Here are relevant conclusions from our 2006 workshop:
Analyses of long-term records of disaster losses indicate that societal change and economic development are the principal factors responsible for the documented increasing losses to date.
Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions.
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.
January 22nd, 2007 at 5:39 pm
It is the nature of insurance companies to cancel policies for any excuse that seems plausible. Clearly the mounting losses along U.S. coastlines are mainly due to the fact that there is an order of magnitude of relatively expensive development than there was a few decades ago. This factor alone probably explains the skyrocketing losses due to weather. I’m not suprised that policies are being cancelled left and right; folks with expensive beachfront houses ARE in high risk zones, AGW or not.
January 23rd, 2007 at 1:01 am
Roger, alright, perhaps what Mills is saying cannot yet be supported. But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as well all know.
Furthermore, don’t you in fact expect that someday the evidentiary case will be made, if we are indeed in for continuing AGW?
January 23rd, 2007 at 5:34 am
A prime example of why I gave up on on Newsweek, Time, or any other news mag that tends to feature pop-culture icons on their cover, decades ago for The Economist as my sole news weeklie.
I guess it is this kind of prominent placement of the meme of the “increasing cost of climate change” continues to propagate and infect the minds of the uninformed and weakly informed.
The effectiveness of the rolodexes of the army of public affairs officers employed by large non-profits in placing this meme in the public arena is an all to often ignored aspect of the issue.
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:35 am
Tom- Thanks. I can imagine Dick Cheney saying something similar in 2003 about WMDs and Iraq.
“But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as well all know. Furthermore, don’t you in fact expect that someday the evidentiary case will be made, if we are indeed in for continuing the war on terror”?
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:54 am
Roger, it was Don Rumsfeld, and I was deliberately paying homage to him.
My question to you was not rhetorical – don’t you in fact expect that someday the evidentiary case will be made that AGW will lead to a shift to more frequent, extreme weather events and contribute to higher disaster losses?
The difference of course between my statement and Rumsfeld’s is that, like you, I believe that there are plenty of other grounds to justify adaptation responses that will dampen disaster losses.
However, I do believe that the possiblity of a linkage between AGW and more extreme weather events/greater losses should be taken into account in considering possible mitigation poicies. An unlike Rumsfeld, who withdrew the UN inspectors, I have an open mind and believe that the research should go on.
January 23rd, 2007 at 7:22 am
Tom-
Well here is what we say in our wrokshop report from last May:
“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.”
Mr. Mills or Newsweek said should something like this rather than something scientifically unsupportable.