The most destructive hurricanes have become much more frequent.
This result is extremely robust to different input data.
ND of ICAT: an increase of 3.2x per century for ND>22bn.
-This is the data that PielkeJr argues has quality issues. But as you will see it does not matter for the results.
ND of W19: An increase of 2.6x per century (ND>11bn).
- PielkeJr is coauthor on the W19 data set. All of his criticisms fall flat on this data set.
The largest hurricane damage events are getting more frequent. -Also in the Weinkle&PielkeJr et al. normalized damage estimates.
They argue that some small events are missing in the early part of the record, -they guestimate their ND value. Unfortunately we can see that this has a profound effect on the distribution which looks sick (pre-1940, ND<1bn).
It is not surprising that the early part of the record looks strange. E.g. They use the damage from "Claudette 2003" to fill-in the missing values for 18 other storms.