Thread by @MichaelEMann

One of the most enduring climate change denial talking points is that there is no trend in hurricane-related damages.

This claim is based almost entirely on the claims of one researcher, Roger Pielke Jr. See e.g. @SkepticScience: skepticalscience.com/climate-change…
(thread)

@skepticscience As I have noted several times before (See:

https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/956225210604294144

), Pielke’s claims are based on (1) a dubious normalization procedure that divides damages by global domestic product (GDP), a quantity that increases dramatically over time and...

@skepticscience (2) use of a simple least squares trend which is problematic for data such as these with a skew distribution. These choices suppress damage trends

@skepticscience A new article in PNAS (@PNASNews) by Grinsted et al (“Normalized US hurricane damage estimates using area of total destruction, 1900-2018”) avoids these pitfalls, using an improved damage metric and more appropriate trend-determination procedures:
phys.org/news/2019-11-h…

@skepticscience @PNASNews The authors key findings:
“Our new record of normalized damage, framed in terms of an equivalent area of total destruction, is a more reliable measure for climate related changes in extreme weather, and can be used for better risk assessments on hurricane disasters” and...

@skepticscience @PNASNews “Our new data reveal an emergent positive trend in damage, which we attribute to a detectable change in extreme storms due to global warming.”

@skepticscience @PNASNews These findings take away key climate denial talking point (i.e. claim that catastrophic increase in hurricane damage is not due to climate change) that we now know was product of bad stats & procedures. Another major denier talking point relegated to the dustbin of history.

@skepticscience "No @michaelemann our hurricane normalization work does not use GDP." (Roger Pielke Jr.)

Except when it does: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…