Scientific Integrity and America’s “Billion Dollar Disaster” -Roger Pielke – Are you interested in it?

From NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Roger Pielke Jr. has long challenged the “billion dollar” disaster disinformation campaign.

Now he’s gone one step further with this peer-reviewed paper:

abstract

For more than two decades, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced the number of weather-related disasters in the United States that it estimates have exceeded one billion dollars (adjusted). adjusted for inflation) in each calendar year beginning in 1980. The data set is widely cited and applied in research, evaluation, and to justify policies by federal agencies, Congress and of the President of the United States. This article performs an evaluation of the dataset against the process and content criteria defined by NOAA’s Information Quality and Scientific Integrity policy. The evaluation found that the “billion dollar disaster” dataset did not meet these criteria. Therefore, public statements made by NOAA regarding the data set and its significance are flawed and at times misleading. Specifically, NOAA incorrectly stated that for some types of severe weather, the dataset demonstrates the ability to detect and distribute changes on climate time scales. Similarly flawed are NOAA’s claims that the increasing number of billion-dollar annual disasters is partly a consequence of human-caused climate change. NOAA’s claims of discovery and recording are not supported by any scientific analysis it has performed. Given the importance and impact of datasets in science and policy, NOAA should act quickly to address this shortfall in scientific integrity.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44304-024-00011-0

Roger also wrote an explanation This.