Have Disaster Losses Increased Due to Anthropogenic Climate Change?

"Have Disaster Losses Increased Due to Anthropogenic Climate Change?"

No. Disaster losses have gone up because the value of things being damaged by bad weather has gone up.

"Should this be considered when assessing the cost/benefit ratio of mitigating versus adapting to climate change?"

Yes. It's a lot cheaper to adapt than it is to mitigate.

Of course there's always a Cassandra-kicker...

"Therefore it can be concluded that *anthropogenic climate change so far* has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters."

The bear is always just out of sight in the woods... "If we don't sacrifice (fill in the blank), we're doomed." "(Fill in the blank) disaster wasn't caused by global warming; but our models prove that such disasters will become more frequent if we don't hand our wallets over to Al Gore and the UN."

It should but it will not be. The AGW backers love to bring out the cost of things destroyed by the environment without stating that is some cases we only recently moved into high risk areas.

It was an interesting article. When you consider increased crop yields, fewer cold related deaths, less fuel to warm homes, more domesticated animals, more wildlife, etc, (I feel those thumbs downs heading my way), and with this study that shows no real additional cost, you have to ask yourself what exactly it is we are mitigating. We are already adapted to climate change. It is easy to adapt to warm beautiful weather. The problems occur far more from cold weather.

There is a parable about the wise builder who builds on stone. Since many of the best places have been taken, builders often now utilize less optimal places to build. As Peter suggested, they often build next to the beach or river or whatever. Often, there is little consequence, since Uncle Sam often rebuilds if these foolish builders encounter a storm.

Presumably if climate change has some negative aspects like the some diseases could become more prevalent due to a slight increase in temperature, then believers would want this taken into account and preferably shouted from the rooftops. If there are some aspects of climate change that are neutral or positive in their effect, then these should be ignored or suppressed.

The data for the document was collected before the Pakistan floods.

Basing worldwide effects on capitol losses has certain bias effects, as the Pakistan floods illustrate. 1/5 of the country was flooded. The total capital in the whole country, though, is not as much as is put at risk in a single rich Florida barrier-island retirement community. Our track record for avoiding or mitigating that type of risk is not encouraging.

When climate change has facts (not theories) to back up their claims, then I'll worry. Tell over 750 climatologists who believe that GW is the biggest hoax ever.

A rather embarrassing time for the authors to issue this overview, wouldn't you agree?

(It is a paper btw, not a study. Continued inaccurate statements just indicate that deniers just can't read very well; scientists are better readers than deniers.)

The weather events of the summer of 2010 has been terribly gruesome and expensive. I am not aware of any weather event as expansive and costly (relative to development) as the flooding in Pakistan. Once new studies are expanded to include 2010, with abnormally devastating events such a Pakistan and the Russia heat wave, as well as more expected levels of disasters such as the flooding in Southern France, this year will stand out and trends will evident.

This paper for some reason choose to ignore heat waves as weather events. That is an importan ommission. It notes that previous studies found an increase, but then offers no further information. The summer of 2003 in Europe is a major ommission. This year in Russia is another major event.

What every study that has tried to document trends in weather events has concluded is that it is very hard to do -- every noted event or trend has possible other explanations. What this paper does is throw-out every study that mentioned there might be other explanations, then conclude that there are no remaining studies. Well duh! It is important for somebody to survey the studies that have been published as this paper does, but it is at least as important to consider what a paper leaves out, and in this case it is missing the most recent time period and heat waves.

The trends will all look different when Pakistan and Russia are added. There will still be people wanting to wait and see if bad stuff still happens more often but it is clear that they are. You'll note that this paper with all its ommissions summarizes the conclusions of the studies it looked at and shows that some found no trend and some found a positive trend -- none found a negative trend.

I really can't see how a reasonable person can read this paper and be at all relieved that severe weather events have not increased.

Possibly not significantly *yet*. According to this particular study, "Analyses show that although economic losses from weather related hazards have increased, anthropogenic climate change so far did not have a significant impact on losses from natural disasters."

But it also points out "Studies that project future losses may give a better indication of the potential impact of climate change on disaster losses and needs for adaptation, than the analysis of historical losses."

In other words, the anthropogenic signal hasn't had a significant impact on disaster losses *yet*, but it will.

"Should this be considered when assessing the cost/benefit ratio of mitigating versus adapting to climate change?"

Only if the planet stops warming (which as we all know, it won't). If (when) it continues warming, this study isn't very relevant to const/benefit analyses. In fact that's exactly what the paper says in the quote I provided above. Historical losses won't give us much of an idea about future losses as the climate continues to warm.

No. Disaster losses have increased due to more people building on beaches.

The study itself is very non-conclusive. It admits in almost a redundant fashion the amount of uncertainty that remains:

>>>Considerable uncertainties remain in some of these studies, as exposure and vulnerability that influence risk can only be roughly accounted for over time. In particular the potential effects of past risk reduction efforts on the loss increase are often ignored, because data that can be used to correct for these effects is not available. More insight in the relative contribution from climate change on disaster losses could potentially be gained from studies that attempt to project future losses.

It also alludes to the idea that future changes in climate will be larger than before. It's rather obvious that they predict future increases that can be attributed to global climate change:

>>>These studies can assess the impact of future climate change, which is projected to be much larger than the change so far observed.