35 ms·

Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series

103 points by perfunctory 7y ago

Proven 7y ago
As central banks print, real value of all currencies drops, and world population - thanks to energy from affordable fossil fuels, by the way - grows and gets better off, the cost of occasional natural disasters goes up. What a shocker.
Tepix 7y ago
The server seems to be overloaded.
- spurgu 7y ago
  Yeah. The graphic in the article is loaded with ajax so doesn't work from Google's cache either.
  - jmiskovic 7y ago
    It loads on Wayback Machine after a minute. https://web.archive.org/web/20200105124509/https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series https://web.archive.org/web/20200105124509/https://www.ncdc....
- avstrallen 7y ago
  It's certainly malfunctioning, I'm getting an 'invalid upstream proxy response' error and a 502 Bad Gateway on the error handler. This at around 1500GMT 6 Jan 2020.
IanDrake 7y ago
Measuring these disasters with money is about as meaningful as measuring IQ with potatoes.
- sho 7y ago
  Why on earth would you say that? Arguments against attempting to avert these disasters will inevitably be based on cost. Presenting the consequences in monetary terms will help counter these arguments.
  - bfieidhbrjr 7y ago
    Because first there’s M0 inflation to take out, and then it’s well known that claims inflate for the same damage over time, and courts award bigger damages and so on. Dollars are a problematic way to measure it.
    - simonh 7y ago
      They're a problematic way to measure anything, but often they're the best we've got, especially when what we're measuring is economic costs.
      - mytailorisrich 7y ago
        It depends on what we want to measure and for what reason. Here I expect this time series will be used to illustrate consequences of climate change without taking into account that the US' population has grown by 45% since 1980 and that the US' real GDP has grown by 171%, which makes this time series a poor proxy metric especially when there are direct metrics (e.g. number of hurricanes, etc. per year) available.
        nothrabannosir 7y ago
        This sounds interesting and, to my amateur ears, at least worth considering. Is there any possibility of correcting for those factors? Would that satisfy as an indicator of climate change (or lack thereof)?
        matthewdgreen 7y ago
        The fact that more people are building in climate-vulnerable areas is a very good thing to know about — and that’s the kind of data that this kind of series will highlight. If you want historical hurricane data I’m sure you can get that from NOAA. However, that kind of data won’t give you insight into the human impact of that weather in the same way this series does.
- jonathanstrange 7y ago
  You can measure almost anything with money, provided you're careful about it. That's how insurance companies evaluate risk without loosing money. In the case of disasters, it's really quite simple. Somebody has to pay for the damages (incl. life insurance, medical bills, etc.), and you can estimate these costs fairly accurately if you have enough data. I'm not saying that all values can be compared to monetary value. There are (or may be, depending on your viewpoint) certain kinds of value that are hard to translate to monetary value, for example those that are based on merely ordinal comparisons, those that are highly subjective and for which at the same time there is no market and it makes no sense to assume one, or those that involve context-dependent preferences or other non-standard features like non-transitive preferences with semiorder or interval order representations. However, those rarely play a role in policy making where every implementation of a policy has a cost and different budgets need to be brought into some reasonable equilibrium.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It is meaningful but in a slightly confusing way as a mixed proxy for wealth of the area, density, and severity with the last potentially "rounded down to zero" by appropriate countermeasures. It does ignore the human costs so one empty mansion getting wrecked vs an entire favella killing thousands for instance the previous looking worse. Combine that with a rise in development making it look worse without completly mitigating counter measures - it models the fiscals of the disastee only. Important if it is your job to try to assess liabilities and baseline what is cost effective for prevention but not a measure directly of human cost or devestation.
- Fricken 7y ago
  As you can see by the replies, most people can only think in terms of potatoes. If we were smarter we'd do it a better way.
zosima 7y ago
1. The graph is apparently adjusted for CPI, but not house prices. House prices especially in big cities has mostly gone up much more than CPI over time. [1] 2. Including only billion dollars climate events does seem misleading and especially prone to statistical bias. Both bias towards local weather around cities, but also for modern days, partly because of 1. 3. Population has gone up and cities expanded so there's now a much larger area to make billion dollars devastation on. Using percentage of GDP and not setting an arbitrary threshold of a billion dollars would rectify some of these problems. An alternative graph is provided here [2], and on that it's much harder to spot a trend. [1] https://www.bankingstrategist.com/housing-prices-hpi-vs-cpi https://www.bankingstrategist.com/housing-prices-hpi-vs-cpi [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/11/07/everything-you-hear-about-billion-dollar-disasters-is-wrong/#2c7385322fea https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/11/07/everythi...
- mfer 7y ago
  Florida is one of the places I look for when it comes to this. According to the NOAA [1] they have not really been able to detect an increase in hurricanes (the natural disaster that semi-regularly hits Florida) due to climate change. Yet, there has been growth in GDP and population. So, the increase cost in Florida is, at least in part, due to the increase in what people have. If we have more and more expensive things (especially nice buildings) it's going to cost more even when the weather stays relatively the same. Disclaimer, I'm not making a statement on climate change. I use FL as an example to highlight a different point. In the reference you'll see there is talk of places where observations of change have occurred. [1] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/ https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
  - breakyerself 7y ago
    There has not been an increase in frequency of hurricanes, but there has been an increase in the energy carried by hurricanes and hurricanes intensify faster than they used to. It is wrong to imply all of the increase in damages is due to economic growth. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/atlantic-hurricanes-are-becoming-stronger-faster-largely-due-to-climate-change https://e360.yale.edu/digest/atlantic-hurricanes-are-becomin...
ThomPete 7y ago
This tells nothing about weather or climate and everything about how rich we've become and where we are able to build today. It's simply misleading to put it up this way. Even if the weather was getting less extreme you could experience an increase in cost. This is all the way up there with the claims of oil subsidies by measuring only arbitrary negative externalities with not talk about the positive ones (and no they are not factored into the price)
- Retric 7y ago
  Future impacts are not simply based on the weather but also people’s building habits. Any prediction ignoring such factors is going to be meaningless. Edit: But, that does not mean the current impact of climate change on these numbers are meaningless nor that further climate change can’t make the situation worse.
  - ThomPete 7y ago
    Thats what I am saying.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Not quite, saying the economy is the most important part of this graph is not enough to dismiss the impact of climate change.
      - ThomPete 7y ago
        What I am saying is that the reason the cost can be bigger even if there were less extreme weather is that we have more stuff and we build places we didn't before. We have more stuff to be destroyed. You would have so show the same amount of stuff, extreme weather and that this extreme weather is because of climate change to make a case for this to be climate related. It's the usual sloppy catastrophic thinking that we unfortunately see in this highly policial debate.
        7y ago
mfer 7y ago
Side note, because of the way the page is constructed the data isn't part of the backup kept by the Internet Archive.
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  Programmer but not a web dev here - why not? View Source tells me it's pulling data from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/disaster-mugl.xml https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/disaster-mugl.xml. It's formatted by the fancy JS graph stuff, and displayed by: <div class="multigraph" data-src="/billions/disaster-mugl.xml?disasters[]=drought.. with links to the time series data below the graph. In what way does this not make the data available to the Internet Archive? How could this page (or a hypothetical similar page on my personal blog) have been constructed to (1) make the data available to IA and (2) make it not vulnerable to an HN hug-of-death (it looks like just some static assets with a user-side dynamic Javascript graph that would be trivial to serve to my untrained eyes).
Gravityloss 7y ago
Climate news brings out all the nit picking. We will never reach 100.0000000000% certainty, and even then you can just argue for more zeros.
- crystaldev 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
mirimir 7y ago
Even though the methodology is iffy, the evidence for CO2 and mean temperature increases is solid enough to take it seriously. And if the data is valid and the trend is real, the next decade or two should be interesting.
- plutonorm 7y ago
  Solid enough? Its cast iron.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    I agree. And it just keeps getting better and better. Or worse and worse, if we're considering the impacts.

103 points by perfunctory 7y ago

As central banks print, real value of all currencies drops, and world population - thanks to energy from affordable fossil fuels, by the way - grows and gets better off, the cost of occasional natural disasters goes up. What a shocker.

Tepix 7y ago

The server seems to be overloaded.

spurgu 7y ago
Yeah. The graphic in the article is loaded with ajax so doesn't work from Google's cache either.
- jmiskovic 7y ago
  It loads on Wayback Machine after a minute. https://web.archive.org/web/20200105124509/https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series https://web.archive.org/web/20200105124509/https://www.ncdc....
avstrallen 7y ago
It's certainly malfunctioning, I'm getting an 'invalid upstream proxy response' error and a 502 Bad Gateway on the error handler. This at around 1500GMT 6 Jan 2020.

IanDrake 7y ago

Measuring these disasters with money is about as meaningful as measuring IQ with potatoes.

sho 7y ago
Why on earth would you say that? Arguments against attempting to avert these disasters will inevitably be based on cost. Presenting the consequences in monetary terms will help counter these arguments.
- bfieidhbrjr 7y ago
  Because first there’s M0 inflation to take out, and then it’s well known that claims inflate for the same damage over time, and courts award bigger damages and so on. Dollars are a problematic way to measure it.
  - simonh 7y ago
    They're a problematic way to measure anything, but often they're the best we've got, especially when what we're measuring is economic costs.
    - mytailorisrich 7y ago
      It depends on what we want to measure and for what reason. Here I expect this time series will be used to illustrate consequences of climate change without taking into account that the US' population has grown by 45% since 1980 and that the US' real GDP has grown by 171%, which makes this time series a poor proxy metric especially when there are direct metrics (e.g. number of hurricanes, etc. per year) available.
      - nothrabannosir 7y ago
        This sounds interesting and, to my amateur ears, at least worth considering. Is there any possibility of correcting for those factors? Would that satisfy as an indicator of climate change (or lack thereof)?
      - matthewdgreen 7y ago
        The fact that more people are building in climate-vulnerable areas is a very good thing to know about — and that’s the kind of data that this kind of series will highlight. If you want historical hurricane data I’m sure you can get that from NOAA. However, that kind of data won’t give you insight into the human impact of that weather in the same way this series does.
jonathanstrange 7y ago
You can measure almost anything with money, provided you're careful about it. That's how insurance companies evaluate risk without loosing money. In the case of disasters, it's really quite simple. Somebody has to pay for the damages (incl. life insurance, medical bills, etc.), and you can estimate these costs fairly accurately if you have enough data. I'm not saying that all values can be compared to monetary value. There are (or may be, depending on your viewpoint) certain kinds of value that are hard to translate to monetary value, for example those that are based on merely ordinal comparisons, those that are highly subjective and for which at the same time there is no market and it makes no sense to assume one, or those that involve context-dependent preferences or other non-standard features like non-transitive preferences with semiorder or interval order representations. However, those rarely play a role in policy making where every implementation of a policy has a cost and different budgets need to be brought into some reasonable equilibrium.
Nasrudith 7y ago
It is meaningful but in a slightly confusing way as a mixed proxy for wealth of the area, density, and severity with the last potentially "rounded down to zero" by appropriate countermeasures. It does ignore the human costs so one empty mansion getting wrecked vs an entire favella killing thousands for instance the previous looking worse. Combine that with a rise in development making it look worse without completly mitigating counter measures - it models the fiscals of the disastee only. Important if it is your job to try to assess liabilities and baseline what is cost effective for prevention but not a measure directly of human cost or devestation.
Fricken 7y ago
As you can see by the replies, most people can only think in terms of potatoes. If we were smarter we'd do it a better way.

zosima 7y ago

1. The graph is apparently adjusted for CPI, but not house prices. House prices especially in big cities has mostly gone up much more than CPI over time. [1] 2. Including only billion dollars climate events does seem misleading and especially prone to statistical bias. Both bias towards local weather around cities, but also for modern days, partly because of 1. 3. Population has gone up and cities expanded so there's now a much larger area to make billion dollars devastation on. Using percentage of GDP and not setting an arbitrary threshold of a billion dollars would rectify some of these problems. An alternative graph is provided here [2], and on that it's much harder to spot a trend. [1] https://www.bankingstrategist.com/housing-prices-hpi-vs-cpi https://www.bankingstrategist.com/housing-prices-hpi-vs-cpi [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/11/07/everything-you-hear-about-billion-dollar-disasters-is-wrong/#2c7385322fea https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/11/07/everythi...

mfer 7y ago
Florida is one of the places I look for when it comes to this. According to the NOAA [1] they have not really been able to detect an increase in hurricanes (the natural disaster that semi-regularly hits Florida) due to climate change. Yet, there has been growth in GDP and population. So, the increase cost in Florida is, at least in part, due to the increase in what people have. If we have more and more expensive things (especially nice buildings) it's going to cost more even when the weather stays relatively the same. Disclaimer, I'm not making a statement on climate change. I use FL as an example to highlight a different point. In the reference you'll see there is talk of places where observations of change have occurred. [1] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/ https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
- breakyerself 7y ago
  There has not been an increase in frequency of hurricanes, but there has been an increase in the energy carried by hurricanes and hurricanes intensify faster than they used to. It is wrong to imply all of the increase in damages is due to economic growth. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/atlantic-hurricanes-are-becoming-stronger-faster-largely-due-to-climate-change https://e360.yale.edu/digest/atlantic-hurricanes-are-becomin...

ThomPete 7y ago

This tells nothing about weather or climate and everything about how rich we've become and where we are able to build today. It's simply misleading to put it up this way. Even if the weather was getting less extreme you could experience an increase in cost. This is all the way up there with the claims of oil subsidies by measuring only arbitrary negative externalities with not talk about the positive ones (and no they are not factored into the price)

Retric 7y ago
Future impacts are not simply based on the weather but also people’s building habits. Any prediction ignoring such factors is going to be meaningless. Edit: But, that does not mean the current impact of climate change on these numbers are meaningless nor that further climate change can’t make the situation worse.
- ThomPete 7y ago
  Thats what I am saying.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Not quite, saying the economy is the most important part of this graph is not enough to dismiss the impact of climate change.
    - ThomPete 7y ago
      What I am saying is that the reason the cost can be bigger even if there were less extreme weather is that we have more stuff and we build places we didn't before. We have more stuff to be destroyed. You would have so show the same amount of stuff, extreme weather and that this extreme weather is because of climate change to make a case for this to be climate related. It's the usual sloppy catastrophic thinking that we unfortunately see in this highly policial debate.
      - 7y ago

mfer 7y ago

Side note, because of the way the page is constructed the data isn't part of the backup kept by the Internet Archive.

LeifCarrotson 7y ago
Programmer but not a web dev here - why not? View Source tells me it's pulling data from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/disaster-mugl.xml https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/disaster-mugl.xml. It's formatted by the fancy JS graph stuff, and displayed by: <div class="multigraph" data-src="/billions/disaster-mugl.xml?disasters[]=drought.. with links to the time series data below the graph. In what way does this not make the data available to the Internet Archive? How could this page (or a hypothetical similar page on my personal blog) have been constructed to (1) make the data available to IA and (2) make it not vulnerable to an HN hug-of-death (it looks like just some static assets with a user-side dynamic Javascript graph that would be trivial to serve to my untrained eyes).

Gravityloss 7y ago

Climate news brings out all the nit picking. We will never reach 100.0000000000% certainty, and even then you can just argue for more zeros.

crystaldev 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures

mirimir 7y ago

Even though the methodology is iffy, the evidence for CO2 and mean temperature increases is solid enough to take it seriously. And if the data is valid and the trend is real, the next decade or two should be interesting.

plutonorm 7y ago
Solid enough? Its cast iron.
- mirimir 7y ago
  I agree. And it just keeps getting better and better. Or worse and worse, if we're considering the impacts.