🚨Important🚨
A new independent validation of our normalization methods & result
Alstadt, B., Hanson, A., & Nijhuis, A. (2022). Developing a Global Method for Normalizing Economic Loss from Natural Disasters. Natural Hazards Review, 23(1), 04021059. ascelibrary.org/doi/full/10.10…
A "normalized" record of disaster losses asks what damage would occur if past extreme events occurred with today's societal conditions
Over many decades, climate changes and varies, of course
But society also changes on that timescale as well
So normalization is needed
🍎to🍎
Alstadt et al 2022 (AHN22) seek to "to develop a global approach to normalize past exposure to current levels using the value of capital stock" rather than GDP
We agree 100%
Where available we have always used capital stock in our normalization studies (eg hurricanes, tornadoes)
AHN22 (AHN20 in the figure) results confirm strongly the robustness of our US hurricane normalizations (most recently Weinkle et al 2018 - PL18, CL18 in figure & Pielke et al 2005 - PL03 in figure))
In fact, when compared to an independent record of US landfalls, AHN22 offers similar results to Weinkle et al 2018 and Pielke et al 2005
This is really great to see😎
AHN22 describes the normalized trends that they find (1930 to 2017) for CONUS hurricanes: : "losses on a decadal scale were higher in the earlier part of the twentieth century, lower in the 1970s and 1980s, and then higher again in the first decades of the twenty-first century"
Bottom lines:
➡️Normalization methods are robust
➡️Where available capital stock is preferred over GDP
➡️Once normalized, US hurricane losses show no trend over 20th century, consistent with lack of upward trends in US landfalls
🙏
Here is our most recent US hurricane normalization
Weinkle, Landsea, Collins, Musulin, Crompton, Klotzbach & Pielke, (2018). Normalized hurricane damage in the continental United States 1900–2017. Nature Sustainability, 1(12), 808-813. nature.com/articles/s4189…
And here is a recent literature review I did of 54 normalization studies around the world
Pielke, R. (2021). Economic ‘normalisation’ of disaster losses 1998–2020: a literature review and assessment. Environmental Hazards, 20(2), 93-111. doi.org/10.1080/174778…
At times, in its assessments IPCC authors have shown an aversion to normalization research (see tweet below)
The research is so overwhelming (a consensus one might say) that how the IPCC treats normalization offers a good test of whether it is playing things straight or not
Climate cost-benefit analyses are going to look very different when the question is not from below: “what bad things happens when we exceed 1.5C?” But instead, from above: “what benefits will we see if we return to 1.5C?”
What happens if the world warms another 0.4C (from 1.1C today to 1.5C within a decade or so) and the world looks a lot like it does today?
Future temperature targets offer the political asset of uncertain impacts
Once those targets are exceeded that uncertainty goes away
Consider:
The 1970s global average surface temperatures were about 1C less than today … no one I am aware of is making the case that the climate of the 1970s is one we should try to return to (for obvious reasons, 1970s were a decade of many global extremes)
The idea that any domestics policies are made at COPs is wrong
Domestic policies are made in legislatures, parliaments & power centers of sovereign nations
Paris corrected Kyoto’s flaw in this regard
Paris allows a public statement of pledges & reporting on progress
Many seem to believe that leaders of sovereign states can make policy, pledges or promises at COPs
The biggest news in the Global Carbon Budget 2021 is a very large downward revision in CO2 emissions from land use
The downward revision is about the same size as the total emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels from the EU17 or India
Of course caveats about uncertainties . . .
Compared to when I went to sleep last night, our perception of the magnitude of the net-zero challenge just improved (it is stull huge, but less huger than we thought)
I'm lecturing in class today on this brilliant paper by Mike Hulme
"Climate reductionism is the means by which the knowledge claims of the climate modelers are transferred, by proximity as it were, to the putative knowledge claims of the social, economic, and political analysts"
Hulme observes, correctly, that climate reductionism can be found in the scenarios of the IPCC which fix society and vary climate ... this is common in the climate impacts literature (eg, when adaptation is ignored)
We see climate reductionism in the IPCC15 report where societal impacts of 1.5C are compared to 2C (as reported yesterday by NYT below)
Little known is that almost all of these differences in impacts occur under scenarios that ignore human adaptation ... as if
The publication today of the 2021 FCCC NDCs reinforces the utter implausibility of CMIP/IPCC baseline scenarios (7.0, 8.5) unfccc.int/sites/default/…
It also should mark the last time anyone cites Schwalm et al 2020 to defend RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 as BAU (or even as plausible)
Absolutely huge news
UN FCCC expectations for 2030 GHG emissions
2016 INDCs = 62.0 Gt CO2-eq
2021 NDCs = 51.5 Gt CO2-eq
Net-zero is a massive challenge, of course, but compared to 5 years ago the world is now in a much better position that was expected unfccc.int/sites/default/…