First, recognizing that there are regional differences, more locations saw decreasing trends than increasing trends
Overall, that means less flooding
Second - and this is really important - evidence of decreasing floods are contrary to evidence of increasing precipitation, and specifically maximum precipitation intensities
So YES extreme precip is going up (due to CC), but that does not mean that floods are also!
We actually addressed this apparent paradox more than 20 years ago!
Pielke, R. A., & Downton, M. W. (1999). US trends in streamflow and precipitation: Using societal impact data to address an apparent paradox. Bulletin-American Meteorological Society, 80, 1435-1436.
Back to Do et al
Third, trends in floods do not explain trends in damage
Exposure and vulnerability matter more (of course they do)
Fortunately there is now a large literature from around the world that assesses flood damage in the context of both precip/flood trends and trends in vulnerability exposure doi.org/10.1080/174778…
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A time series of base (i.e., current-year) loses was first compiled from annual reports published in the Monthly Weather Review by Chris Landsea in 1989 for 1949-1989
I extended the data using same methods to 1996
Chris and I extended back to 1900 for Pielke and Landsea 1998
Then, Pielke et al. 2008 extend the dataset to 2005, again using the same methods
The heavy lifting was done by my then-student Joel Gratz
Joel graduated and went to an insurance company called ICAT . . .
Last month I revealed based on files part of the public record of the Michael Mann trial how Mann coordinated peer review of a paper of mine to ensure that it "would not see the light of day"
I only had a snippet of the relevant Mann email
Now I have the whole thing
And JFC...
First
New: the editor of GRL, Jay Familigetti, originally sent our submission to Mann!
That's right
A paper by Pielke & @ClimateAudit was sent to Mann to peer review
Mann wisely didn't accept but instead recommended hostile reviewers so that "it would not see the light of day"
@ClimateAudit Mann emails his partners Caspar Amann (NCAR) and Gavin Schmidt (NASA) to express his glee that this gives him an opportunity to cause harm
🧵
"The U.S. installed 1,700 miles of new high-voltage transmission miles per year on average in the first half of the 2010s but dropped to only 645 miles per year on average in the second half of the 2010s"
The US has 240,000 miles of high voltage transmission capacity
An expansion of 645 miles/year is just about 0.3%/yr
Take that 0.3%/year HV grid expansion to the next Tweet
The Princeton study (@JesseJenkins) used to promote the Inflation Reduction Act claimed the HV grid has been expanding at a rate of 1% per year based on a newsletter from JP Morgan
That 1% is >3x greater than actual recent grid expansion rates of 0.3%