Thread by @RogerPielkeJr

🚨Important New Paper🚨

Pielke, Jr., R. 2021 (in press). Economic “Normalization” of Disaster Losses 1998-2020: A Literature Review and Assessment

A few years in the making, a robust peer review process

Now accepted

1/2: "This paper reviews 54 normalization studies published 1998 to 2020 and finds little evidence to support claims that any part of the overall increase in global economic losses documented on climate time scales can be attributed to human-caused changes in climate..."

"... reinforcing conclusions of recent assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Some excerpts follow...

Don't look for evidence of climate change in economic loss data (normalized or not) -- use climate data directly

What is a "normalization" anyway?

Aggregate disaster losses can increase, yet we could still be doing better

That is why the UN Sustainable Development Goals use declining disaster losses as a % of GDP as a metric of success

The IPCC has in the past produced literature reviews of normalization studies

It is a fast-growing literature, with 54 total studies of which 23 published since 2015

Of these 54 studies:
✅53 focus on weather or climate
✅39 find no trends after normalization
✅8 find decreasing trends
✅5 find increasing
✅1 finds mixed trends

The most studied phenomena is US hurricanes
➡️3 find increasing trends
➡️7 find no trends

Fortunately, we can use an independent climatological record to evaluate these competing claims

And the evidence is pretty overwhelming

Everything in this paper is consistent with the assessments of the IPCC, USNCA, WMO and Indian Government

Could a consensus be wrong? Sure

But this as about as strong a consensus as you will find in climate research

Of course, don't confuse absence of evidence with evidence of absence

Of course climate change is real & can influence extremes

This is robust, hardcore, mainstream, consensus science
Don't be trying to say any different

Independent climate research on detection and attribution of trends in phenomena most responsible for economic losses from extremes is perfectly consistent with the broad normalization literature -- as we would expect

A large literature on vulnerability is also consistent with the normalization literature (also discussed in depth)

Conclusions