What to Think - and do - About "Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters"

This is the podcast version of my Sustain What show on an illuminating Washington Post story on issues and insights around the newsmaking and much-cited “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” assessments by NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I’ve been deeply impressed with Harry Stevens’ reporting on climate at the Washington Post in his Climate Lab columns. He’s outdone himself with a big new analysis of the insights and issues around the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s much-covered tally of “billion dollar weather and climate disasters” from extreme climate events. Gift link: http://wapo.st/3YiJgaz. The key takeaways are:

• The tracking project is valuable but there are lots of important questions about how the disasters are measured and compiled.

• Frequent efforts by elected officials, activists and climate-centric journalists to use the surge in billion-dollar disasters as evidence of human-driven climate change have no solid basis in data.

We were joined by Jessica Weinkle, a researcher at the interface of climate and society at the University of North Carolina, Wilmigton. She’s writing up a storm on Substack on her Conflicted dispatch and on Breakthrough Journal. In a recent Breakthrough Institute post on the expanding bull’s eye of vulnerable development in coastal North Carolina, she included just one of countless visuals demonstrating that humans are worsening climate risk far faster on the ground than they are through the heat-trapping influence of greenhouse gases on the global climate:

Google Earth Images of the Riverlights development area in 2007 (left) and 2024 (right). Images annotated by Jessica Weinkle

Please watch or listen here and share our discussion on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or the recorded stream on X at @revkin.

Here’s the “curtain raiser” post from this morning: