Weather disasters are the journalistic equivalent of potato chips. Betcha can’t eat one.
Extreme weather has it all for the news business. Great images, heart-wrenching human stories, lots of blame to spread. And for climate evangelists, it’s self-evident evidence, meaning evidence to oneself.
But for those who value data over image or ideology, 2023 doesn’t cut it. While every tornado, hurricane, drought, flood, or wildfire gets attributed to our warming climate, gimlet eyed climate watcher Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado points out that 2023 wasn’t evidence for any kind of trend other than normality. This, of course, wins him scorn and heaps of abuse from those who have a personal or political interest in assurances that the sky is falling as we fiddle.
In his newsletter, The Honest Broker, Pielke Jr. (the “junior” appendage is important, as his father is a distinguished climatologist at Colorado) writes, “The weather — and certainly the impacts — of the past 12 months in the United States was actually pretty typical, even benign, in historical context.”
Temperatures, summer and winter, were higher in 2023, he acknowledges, particularly in the winter. But the impacts weren’t unusual. Using dollar values of extreme weather (not necessarily a valid metric, but one favored by climate catastrophists), “This year will come in well below average for the total and insured economic costs of disasters in the United States, mainly because the only landfalling hurricane (Idalia) resulted in less than $1 billion in total damages, far less than the $22+ billion of an average hurricane season.”
Pielke offers a chart from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, to illustrate the U.S. temperature fluctuations in 2023.
He observes, “Month-by-month, 2023 ventured above and below the zero-line of the NOAA temperature anomaly time series. You can see from the figure above that there is no trend in this time series since December 2000, which is counter to what has occurred globally.”
Then he looks at some of the familiar extreme weather events and how they showed up in the U.S. in 2023:
Hurricanes: He noted that “as far as landfalls and damage, just Hurricane Idalia which was preliminarily classified as a Category 3 storm, but to date just over $300 million in insured damage … Zzzzzz.”
Flooding: “The US sees a lot of flooding every year. It is normal. This year saw its fair share but nothing unusual or particularly damaging. Disaster declarations don’t tell us anything about climate, but they do tell us something about disaster declarations — 2023 saw (to date) 19 flood-related FEMA disaster declarations, which is just about exactly the average from 2000-2022.”
Drought: “2023 was not particularly exceptional for drought in long-term context. In fact, compared to one year ago, 2023 has seen a markedly improvement in US drought conditions….”
Tornados, Hail, Wind: “The data shows that tornadoes are a bit above the recent average and hail is a bit below. Winds, in contrast, were exceptionally high in 2023. Given that convective storms produce tornadoes, hail and winds, I am looking forward to how meteorologists explain these contrasting trends of 2023. Economic losses from hail and wind were quite large in 2023.”
Wildfire: “Remarkably, 2023 has seen the fewest acres burned in the US since 1998. Everyone has heard about the record wildfires in Canada, but the quiet US season has been largely ignored.”
When you see on TV or read in the papers about extreme weather events, it’s worthwhile to be skeptical about the accompanying journalistic hype (often spread by policy advocates, sometimes a conditioned reflex by the producer or writer). When it comes to important issues such as global warming, anecdotes aren’t necessarily evidence.
Extreme weather is exciting. It’s significant. It’s clickbait. It is normal.
–Kennedy Maize
kenmaize@gmail.com