Slashdot Mirror
US Disaster Costs Shatter Records In 2017, the Third-Warmest Year On Record (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Major hurricanes and wildfires fueled a record year for costs related to natural disasters in the United States, according to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That report also said 2017 was the third-warmest year in 123 years of record keeping, behind only 2014 and 2012. Natural disasters in the United States cost more than $300 million last year, far surpassing the previous record of $214.8 billion set in 2005, NOAA said Monday. NOAA counted 1 drought event, 2 flooding events, 1 freeze event, 8 severe storm events, 3 tropical cyclone events, and 1 wildfire event during the year that bore losses exceeding $1 billion each. There were also 362 deaths. That would tie with 2011 for the largest number of such billion-dollar disasters, the agency said.
Why would anyone expect the cost of natural disasters to do anything but go up? The price of everything is going up, from real estate to building materials to labor. Every time there is damage the cost of repair will be greater, sometimes much greater. Every year is probably going to be the most expensive. To claim (or imply) we had larger disasters than ever before is simply false, we've had bigger hurricanes, and worse wildfires. Especially speaking of wildfires, THAT is due to Californias stupid policy on never doing controlled burns and the sky-high price of real estate there. Wildfires there are nothing but a man-made disaster, probably caused by "Raw Water" freaks smoking pot as they collect.
I also like how they casually imply the year being warm has strong ties to all the disasters - which include things like a freeze.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
comparing millions to billions... err ? :)
That's how these ridiculous head-in-ass traitors operate, they pretend problems don't exist and everyone who notices any of it is crazy. Period.
Get a rope. The future will wonder why we didn't hold these ridiculous frauds and paid faggots accountable.
While I watch as about a foot of global warming slowly melts after the second longest deep freeze on record slowly lifts, I will also point out that if last year was colder than. 2012 and 2014, an equally valid guess is that those two years were a peak. But the operative word here is "guess." Wait a few more decades for a few more solar cycles to elapse and then you can do some dispassionate analysis. Strangely enough, it's from the humanities that we can take a lesson here: the historians have understood for quite a while that anything more recent than a few decades ago cannot be evaluated objectively.
It's fucking -40 outside. Anyone who says that is "hot" is a fucking moron. This and evolution areis why no one trusts scientists.
Why would anyone expect the cost of natural disasters to do anything but go up? The price of everything is going up, from real estate to building materials to labor. Every time there is damage the cost of repair will be greater, sometimes much greater. Every year is probably going to be the most expensive. To claim (or imply) we had larger disasters than ever before is simply false, we've had bigger hurricanes, and worse wildfires. Especially speaking of wildfires, THAT is due to Californias stupid policy on never doing controlled burns and the sky-high price of real estate there. Wildfires there are nothing but a man-made disaster, probably caused by "Raw Water" freaks smoking pot as they collect.
I also like how they casually imply the year being warm has strong ties to all the disasters - which include things like a freeze.
I'm not quite sure of your premise, one thing about natural disasters is that we get to learn from them.
For example, the Loma Prieta earthquake (California 6.9, 1989), worth $5.6 in damages, caused changes in building codes to make the buildings more tolerant of earthquakes. There have been further earthquakes of roughly the same magnitude, with much less damage. It's not completely comperable, the 1994 Northridge earthquake caused more damage, because earthquakes happen at different places and magnitudes.
The New Orleans Levee breaches that caused all the flooding: OK, we should have seen that coming, but have we fixed the problems there? Would another hurricane cause as much damage?
And there are near disasters that cause us to harden our defenses. The recent Oroville Dam crisis in California is getting fixed to better withstand seasonally unusual conditions, and no one wants to build nuclear reactors after Fukishima.
Historically speaking, I'm not entirely sure that the costs of disasters should keep going up.
Disasters tend to have happened before, and people tend to make plans.
I'm archiving this to use against the liars that published it in the future.
Editors?
As we all know, weather (or seasons) is/are not climate. You can't say any one particularly bad freeze is really due to climate change, because the possibility of a bad freeze was always there and as I noted, there have been worse instances in the past of all of the disasters we have seen this year.
Yes climate change could theoretically cause larger variations but the freeze this year is an example of weather, not climate, in action - as any ONE event would be, since one evert does not a trend make. Over time we can see, are things occurring more frequently? Are they truly worse than average? Then maybe we can point to climactic change being at issue, but we certainly do not have data points like that yet for freezes (or really any other large scale disasters, since recent years before the last one have been quiet for hurricanes).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
These false reports are a product of Soros, Hillary, Obama, and leftist globalists who seek a one world government. It will be a world without rights. It will be a world where big brother watches your every move. What you eat, what you watch, what you think will be monitored for "correctness".
Independent thought will be forbidden, and punished under penalty of death. It is a world governed by elites behind the walls of their gated enclaves. Everything will be rationed, and your share will be based upon you compliance with their directives.
Fact: there is no global warming. It is THE BIG LIE. It is a product of Joseph Goebbels and his spiritual descendants among the leftist elite. Don't buy what they are peddling. Use your common sense and ask Cui bono?. Not the little guy. Only the privileged. Only the elite.
That still doesn't give the whole picture because areas affected most by disasters (generally the coasts) have prices that go up way faster than inflation, AND a lot more construction over time to boot. Just think of how many multi-million dollar homes burnt down in the CA wildfires alone, that greatly affects the damage total compared to flooding a lot of $100-300k homes in Houston.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1 single volcano puts off more carbon monoxide that all the cars ever built. Yet we are still alive.
Grow up people, global warming is a giant lie.
Yes he does. He deceives on purpose.
And not just million dollar homes, but also vineyards and their buildings. Worth much more than a neighborhood in Kansas destroyed by a tornado.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
The side story here is that the government is banned by Trump from considering climate change in disaster planning.... So they do it anyway and call it weather planning.
Their duty is to protect USA from disaster so they side with the majority of Americans and continue to do their jobs professionally.... But then do does Trumps golf course manager who built the floodwall. Trump does his tweeting. They do their management and he whines about how they don't follow his brain farts.
A month ago 2017 was the hottest year on record
https://futurism.com/2017-set-hottest-year-recorded-history/
A week ago 2017 was the 2nd hottest year on record
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-temperatures/2017-was-second-hottest-year-on-record-after-sizzling-2016-report-idUSKBN1ET1JF
Now it's third. In the near future, it will undoubtedly drop to 4th with no fanfare or press.
GLOBAL WOOOOOOOOORMING STRIKES AGAIN
Yes, comrade - let us open up the Northwest Passage to shipping from Russia by flooding all American coastal cities.
We will drown them in their own retardation for a great Russian Empire!
Engage the internet yokels to demonstrate their retardation on a variety of subjects comrade!
$214.8B in 2005 is only around $270 in 2017, depending on which month you look at. But it ended up being $300B (I presume they had a units error in TFA) which exceeds inflation.
Are there more houses in affected areas now than there were in 2009? If the answer is yes, why are you factoring in only inflation for houses that existed that whole time, instead of adding in the additional value of the extra structures built, along with the much greater than average increase in home cost in most of the affected regions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... cost more than $300 million last year, far surpassing the previous record ...
Yes but you are ignoring the savings! Don't forget that we completely ignored the devastation in Puerto Rico, thereby saving at least 100 million. As long as we can ignore the discomfort of certain classes of citizens we can manage costs effectively.
...omphaloskepsis often...
So here's some ching chong porn to straighten things up. </thread>
If this is the third warmest on record then it's getting cooler? Must be.
Of course claiming that having the third warmest on record does not mean it is getting cooler, any more than saying that greater costs from storms and wildfires proves it is getting warmer.
Want to know what would convince me that the world is in fact getting warmer? Or, more accurately, that the powers that be are convinced global warming is more than just a theory? I'd be convinced of this being a real deal if the powers that be started to act like this was a problem.
Instead of flying everywhere to meet then maybe the people in government might figure out ways to make phone calls and such to discuss issues. Maybe they don't need to take so many vacations, or appear in person on late night television. I can hear it now, "But Trump does it too!" Yes, indeed he does. The difference is that Trump isn't telling me that I can't do it too. We need leadership by example.
Also on leadership I'd like to see some action where regulations are keeping the market from reducing CO2 output on their own. Not drilling for oil and natural gas in the USA only means burning more fuel oil on ships and trains to import it. Natural gas produces half the CO2 as coal for the same energy. Drill, baby, drill!! That's not just generally good advice but it's also how we are going to reduce our carbon output almost overnight.
In the near term we'd need to see more safe, low cost, reliable, plentiful, and "green" energy. I'm sure most of you now know what I'm talking about. Nuclear power. We should be building a new nuclear power reactor every month in the USA to replace the (supposedly) old and unsafe nuclear power plants as well as the old coal plants. If the government wants to convince me I need to change my ways then they need to lead by example and change their ways. Build nuclear power plants or I'm calling this all bullshit. Not just one or two in a decade. We need 100 new nuclear power plants in a decade. There are 100 (at my last count) operating nuclear power plants in the USA and all of but a handful are operating well beyond their intended lifespan. After we build 100 new plants to replace the old then we need 100 more to replace the coal plants. Then 100 more to replace the natural gas plants. After that we'll need 100 more to replace the now old nuclear power plants from when we started and to account for growth.
We'll never really be done building nuclear power plants because they wear out. Well, the ones we built decades ago are worn out and we stopped building them. We need to start again, and build them at a rate of 10 or 12 per year like we did then. If we don't build nuclear power at this rate then, in my mind, the government is telling me that man made global warming is bullshit.
Global warming must be bullshit because the government is not allowing the building of nuclear power at the rate we need to stop it.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
2005's $214.8BN is in line with 2017's $313.89BN. So without the exact number this may mean an overall tie. As for a percentage of GDP, this was 1.6% in 2005. If 2016 numbers are used, $314.89BN is almost fully 2%. This means that while it roughly is following inflation, it is outstripping GDP growth. This also means that inflation is outstripping GDP growth, which itself is very interesting.
It's probably more that the amount of building going on means more fire suppression in lots of areas that are close to houses, so vegetation amasses that would have been otherwise been culled by small natural burns... but I also think California is less prone to support burn offs because it "harms vegetation" and of course the smoke is un-asthetic. They basically need to be planning a lot more controlled burn-off in risky areas and just are not doing so.
It definitely is done in other areas, as you mention, and is really important if you want to avoid firestorms that reduce whole neighborhoods to ash.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's 117F. It was new for Sydney.
It was not new for Sydney.
They "forgot" about records for an older weather station. Would go against the message after all.
It is the highest since *1939*. But that means it was that hot almost a hundred years ago...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Basically, if it's something that tosses a wrench in the climate change narrative? It's WEATHER baby!
If it's something that can be spun to support the climate change narrative? See! That's CLIMATE CHANGE!
And I wish they'd just stop with the fucking screaming about climate change.
So far, their ONLY "solution" is austerity. Which, quite simply, is not conducive to the US maintaining cultural and economic hegemony.
I mean, if we want to cede the planet's cultural future to COMMUNIST CHINA because we're busy moving back into caves due to lack of power, it's AWESOME!
Sorry, but solar and battery STILL doesn't have energy density of fossil fuels or nuclear.
And the NIMBYs don't want us to mine the stuff OURSELVES. So we're totally reliant on Chinese industry, because they haven't given a shit about wrecking their environment.
Well, China's SLOWLY ramping that stuff down and jacking prices up, having captured the market for renewables almost completely.
So, in the long run, relying on renewables FUCKS THE US OVER.
Additionally, China is involved with surveying for fossil fuels in Asia, Africa and South America. Where as the scream-squad would have us just turn off the fossil fuel tap YESTERDAY.
So, until the global warming scream-squad is ready to get REAL about implementing an ENGINEERING SOLUTION with GLOBAL COOPERATION, the US acting alone, or even with the various pointless "climate summits" accomplishes NOTHING on a global scale..
In short, WAKE THE FUCK UP.
If you look at the costs versus GDP, they are actually declining...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Puerto Rico was devastated yes, and much of the country is even now without power.
But only 64 people died. And in return an ancient electrical grid that would have had massive failures in the next few decades, is being rebuilt from disaster funds, which will last them generations more than the old system would have.
A lot of other infrastructure look roads will also be rebuilt. In just two or three years tourism there should be on a major upswing with so many new facilities and infrastructure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Doesn't Soros pay you enough to find more creative insults?
I didn't know $300 million was more than $213 billion! You learn something new everyday!
The only reason why 2017 was notable is that hurricanes decided that the best places to mow down were wealthy US cities. Worldwide costs were up, disasters and deaths were down.
http://www.iflscience.com/envi...
Why would you compare them against GDP? GDP has nothing to do with the actual normative price of recovery services.
Why the rant about CO2? I said nothing about CO2. Why even bring it up in a discussion about weather vs climate? It's un-related. Talk about "do you even science" - do you even read?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your post is absolutely infuriating for its lack of empathy. I hope that you are not representative of the majority, or even a large number, or Americans
CPI adjusted does not take into account many of the factors that I listed, and especially not the fact there are MANY MORE properties than there were in 2005. Also CPI-adjusted is a figure that covers the entire country, (or maybe an entire city, depending on how they adjusted) not specifically the neighborhoods most affected (rich coastal areas) which saw far higher increases in value than the average increase in CPI (even for a given city).
Read other responses as to why CPI is also not a good barometer, but even if you thought it was you should have known it was not an accurate statement after thinking through the statement carefully.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I like the connection by implication of high disaster costs and warming. Not misleading at all - as if "disaster costs" were a metric with any validity whatsoever (and not utterly variable based on fundamental inflation, as well as constantly-inflating seashore property increases, as well as development of land that pushes ever-further into floodplains, marshes, etc.).
Ask yourself: the last time someone used such blatantly misleading 'statistics' to explain something, were they scientists, or snake-oil salesmen?
-Styopa
Popcorn time!
And before anyone gets their moral outrage panties in a knot, let's be honest here: The amount of hot air in this thread alone is good for another degree or two warming. From both sides. I don't even want to know how many global warming proponents here get irate over the ignorance of the deniers while at the same time burning kilowatts mining bitcoins.
Talking here won't change jack shit. Mostly because there are exactly three groups in here: Those that are convinced that global change is a fact and there is nothing to convince them otherwise, those that are convinced global change is a myth, out to get their SUVs, and nothing would convince them otherwise and the increasing number of people, like me, who just don't give a fuck because it's not going to happen during their lifetime that this planet will become uninhabitable, who don't have kids and who simply can't be assed to care about yours anymore.
If you don't want this planet to be hospitable to human life when it's your kids' time to clean up the shit you leave them, why the hell should I care?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Global warming is a myth, a very stable genius told me so.
--
Trump 2020
And TRUMP goes the hurricane.
Illegal immigrants set multiple simultaneous brush fires on Columbus Day to protest racist white people, and the left blames Donald Trump for the global warming that allowing the fires to get out of control.
Sometimes you just can't win. No matter what Donald Trump does they are going to call him racist. So might as well round up all the illegals and protect the national borders.
Every person that dies in a weather or fire related incident will be blamed on Donald Trump. So fuck it. Let's start heating the white house with old tires. That's recycling of a sort. Right?
So prehistoric evidence of much higher temperatures with much lower CO2, and much lower temperatures with higher CO2, aren't "on record"? What a joke. Nobody believes this nonsense any more. The sky is not falling in. There is no such thing as 'catastrophic man-made global warming'.
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
...and that's why hurricanes and tornadoes and whatnot cause more damage than they used to. More "stuff" combined with a dollar not going as far, what else does one think is going to happen?
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
No, he's simply representative of the majority of Republicans.
And if you read the article and looked at the data, it would be clear that $300B was spent above and beyond the norm during Republican administrations dealing with hurricanes in 2005 and 2017.
Given the poor response to Katrina, and the issues re-establishing power in Puerto Rico I wonder where the money really went?
Natural disasters in the United States cost more than $300 million last year, far surpassing the previous record of $214.8 billion set in 2005, NOAA said Monday.
300,000,000 compared to 214,800,000,000?
I guess the USD is just as bad as bitcoin.
$300 million last year, far surpassing the previous record of $214.8 billion
That's ... um... editor asleep at the job much?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Its my understanding that the massive amount of hurricanes this past year was due more to El Nino failing to form, whose wind shear normally acts as a counter to the fragile center of cyclones as they attempt to spin up. There has been no tie established between El Nino failing to form and global warming. As far as expenses related to forest fires, one reader has already pointed out that it took place in practically the most expensive real estate on the continent, outstripping Gatlinburg from the previous fire. Its highly doubtful the california fire was tied to global warming, that place was in a drought when I was stationed there in the 80s. Hence why those Oakland Hills fires were so hard to deal with in 1992. Honestly, I am really surprised that forest fires have not become a means of mass destruction by ISIS. The damage caused by some well placed and timed gasoline and matches outpaces hijacking 4 planes or using an exploding bomb vest and there is very little that can be done to defend against it. Combine a solid 4-6 weeks of drought with some march or october winds and you've got a forest fire that will rage for a good long while.
You whined about the cost of doing anything abut AGW because profits and ideology, and now you're terrified of being answered with evidence why it mattered.
The population of the earth has literally doubled in 40 years. I know that was before you were born, but a lot of these 'records' (casualties, music sales, revenues, etc.) were set when the population was much, much smaller, and we are just seeing the effect of volume. Want to make a difference? Don't have more children than can replace you and your partner. Lower fertility = less strife across the board for *everyone*. Catastrophes and diseases are no more or less catastrophic than they've ever been, WE are the x factor. Believe it or not, also before you were born, we very publicly and earnestly discussed zero population growth globally and it's time we did again.
Another pro nuke shill who fell for the propaganda.. Nuclear power has plenty of real problems especially the privately managed companies; that aside, there are bigger issues you shills do not like to address:
1) Nuclear power is EXPENSIVE; Fuel may be extremely dense but it's limited in quantity and running out; at previous growth levels worldwide, it would be a far bigger problem today if we had been building out at the rate we used to. The USA imports the stuff; the USA used to be the Saudi Arabia for uranium. Peak fuel happened before oil's peak.
2) Solar has been cheaper than Nuclear for a decade. not subsidized - hard to say because I have a hard time finding the extent of all the massive subsidizes nuclear gets. Wind has also surpassed nuclear. Every measure gave solar the lead a few years ago, consensus on wind is around the corner.
3) BUILDING nuclear is very SLOW. it needs to be slow; it has high risks... but building new anything from scratch is slow... it takes years just to put up a small scale solar farm or wind because of permits etc. From plan to finish nuclear takes at least 10 years. ALSO, it's really EXPENSIVE to build... payback on investment almost never happened without massive subsidizes and wavers.
4) Insurance can't even be bought; government subsidizes that. Private insurance won't touch it.
5) Coal is cheaper. Natural Gas is killing Coal (and cheap mountain top removal is killing coal jobs.automation has hardly started.) Plants can be built quickly for either. Biogas and trash burning also can be built cheaper and quicker. Upkeep for all 4 kinds is cheaper too... and can buy private insurance.
6) nuclear can't do baseline power. it is the slowest of all to ramp up & down. Batteries are probably cheaper already (you don't need anywhere near as much backup power as people think... depends on the grid design...which needs a redesign anyway.)
7) next generation nuclear is only 5 years away! it solves all the problems! I've heard this for 20 years. Prove it... then take 10 years just to get reasonable production capacity and costs ready and still probably take 5 years to build each one... Bet if you did it tomorrow, it'll take 15 before they are popping up all over. I'm being generous with time. By then wind/solar/battery will be going faster and cheaper than today with some grid changes beginning.
8) Solar / Wind lobby. A much more decentralized industry, it will still mature into a reasonably sized lobby group and finally provide some balance to the fight; by the time you finish your 1st nuclear plant 10 years from today they'll be screwing you out of your necessary subsidies. The 2 plants started about 8 years ago are arguably failures already and proof to anybody serious about trying that again in the USA.. Not to say that some countries couldn't pull off completing new ones in 5-10 years that are worth the cost... but the odds of that are diminishing.
Get a hand cranked, solar powered radio/flashlight/iPhone charger for when the Earth goes sideways..
What if you compared them to the value of the $US which fell 7% over the year? What currency did those figures use? How were they adjusted for every country (remember you are comparing global GDP and global disasters.) Does the US dollar decline make 2017 cheaper for disasters, or all the other countries disasters more expensive. Or was it too hard and they didn't bother to think about it.
Your meaningless data is only useful for deniers like you to point at and try to sound smart. Guess what, it isn't working.
Better economies mean more spending. That includes more spending on housing and infrastructure, which means there's more to replace later on when a storm destroys it all.
They threw out the first 10 years of data from their source so they could get the answer deniers like you are looking for.
Yes it does change things, the trend is reversed and disasters are getting more expensive. Even if you stupidly compare them with GDP for some strange reason.
They threw out the first 10 years of data from their source so they could get the answer deniers like you are looking for.
No, disasters are getting more expensive.
Just destroy all forests in California, so nothing is left that can burn, then climate change has been stopped! Article is claiming forest fires is the problem right?
More than 1000 deaths from that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
a. NOAA was caught manipulating the data to allow for these "warmest years" claims.... this is all lies and misinformation to push the agenda and /. mods are onboard. Look for this post to be modded down immediately if not sooner.
If you look at their source data. You will notice that they removed the first 10 years and started with 1990 instead of 1980.
Looking at all the data it's clear that they are increasing, even compared with GDP.
That is how you and your deniers site lie with statistics.
But if you look at all the data without cherry picking a start date, they are still going up...
Ah yes, someone who derives his physical science by observing the actions of politicians.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes