Short š§µon US flood damage update
Good news!
Long-term trend (1940-2019) is sharply down as a proportion of US GDPUpdated from Downton et al 2005: https://t.co/aSGvqLNYDA pic.twitter.com/Hbr25K6OUw
— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) January 12, 2021
New 2021 paper by by Firoza Akhter @MauriMazzoleni @l_brandimarte helps to explain these trendshttps://t.co/qfung6k6Dm
Floodplain occupancy has increased but not as fast as overall population growth, with ratio decreasing since ~1950 (figure below) pic.twitter.com/ntOY5ofGaE
— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) January 12, 2021
New PNAS paper attributes to climate change flood damage
Looks only at recent subset of loss time series (1988-2017) & long-term precip (1928-2017)
Below compares our data using short vs long time series
Lesson:
Don't use sub-climate time series to attribute long-term clim chg pic.twitter.com/wVvGespgpH— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) January 12, 2021
Here is that new PNAS paper: https://t.co/clPKUfJUS0
How anyone can get away with looking at 29 years of economic data to make claims of attribution is beyond me
Compare the two contradictory statements in the paper below
Oh, and RCP8.5 … pic.twitter.com/IIwQLRB53T
— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) January 12, 2021
Bottom line
Floods remain a significant economic risk in the US
At the same time the dramatic reduction in flood losses as a proportion of GDP is a major policy success of the past century
/END pic.twitter.com/1UrEISIdte— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) January 12, 2021
PS. More details
Understanding trends in flood damage is _really_ complicated
Here is a framework we published 20 years agohttps://t.co/OiuD3i2hUm pic.twitter.com/FRYvA0MFbf— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) January 12, 2021
Precipitation can be measured any number of ways & different measures of precip are correlated differently with damage in different places
This was a key finding of Pielke & Downton 2000https://t.co/OiuD3i2hUm
More precip, by itself, means neither more flooding nor more damage pic.twitter.com/MfbF1SFGlM
— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) January 12, 2021
