Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

The cost of natural disasters has been going down since 1990

The world’s leading expert on this is @RogerPielkeJr who testified before the Senate on this 2 days ago

@SenatorTester asked the expert from the Union of Concerned Scientists to counter him & of course she couldn’t

That @SenatorTester & so many people are shocked by what should be commonplace knowledge shows the degree to which activists, scientists, & journalists have brainwashed everyone into thinking the exact opposite of the truth

https://twitter.com/rogerpielkejr/status/1417510660204761091

For decades, Roger has explained that the rising cost of disasters is a consequence of more wealth in harm's way.
He shows people pictures of Miami Beach from 1925 and today. When you factor in rising wealth, which is called "normalizing" the data, there is no trend.

But surely hurricanes are hitting more frequently?

They're not.

It's true that the best-available science shows that hurricanes and tropical storms will rise 5% in the 21st Century — but the same science shows their frequency will *decline* by 25%

gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming…

The response to Roger's scientific integrity from journalists, policymakers, and activist-scientists has been shameful. @amprog @michaelemann & "journalists" relentless smeared him. @RepRaulGrijalva implied he was taking money from Exxon. Roger's colleagues behaved cowardly.

They attack Roger because his research undermines their strategy of using every extreme weather event as an opportunity to terrify the population, lobby for subsidies, and evangelize for the new religion. What they most fear is that the public will one day see facts like these:

Yes, there is nuance. Climate change brings more extreme precipitation. But overall, flooding is going down. This only seems paradoxical if you think humans are helpless against... more rain. We're not. We're incredibly good at dealing with it

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1418203464241319945?s=20

Naturally, Roger was among the first to point out how what appears to be paradoxical — more rain and yet less flooding — makes perfect sense. Because: humans are amazing

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1418204920210067461?s=20

The attacks on Roger are part of the broader trend toward what @JonHaidt calls "safetyism," which is the tendency, particularly among progressives, to view people, particular the poor, as essentially helpless victims of their environments.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

You see it in the tweets by @GretaThunberg & other apocalyptic alarmists every time there's a flood or hurricane. But you also see it among IPCC coauthors who suggest that Bangladesh will somehow be unable to adapt to rising sea levels in the ways Netherlands did.

Apocalypse Never contains a passage where I challenge IPCC coauthor Michael Oppenheimer about his claim that climate change could become "unmanageable." He backed down after I pressed him, but most journalists never do that, because they want to write the alarmist story.

Here is an updated graph

https://twitter.com/rogerpielkejr/status/1418215125828259845