Weather Disaster Trends in Europe
February 13, 2024
By Paul Homewood
Roger Pielke Jr has just posted this graph in his latest analysis on Substack:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/weather-and-climate-disasters-in
As Roger comments, given the question marks over the reliability of the data, it is probably fair to say there are no significant trends. What it does show is the enormous variability from year-to-year.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Don’t forget the impact of the expanding bullseye effect, which tends to produce a rising outcome even if nothing changes about the weather.
https://chubasco.niu.edu/ebe.htm#:~:text=A%20conceptual%20model%20of%20the,of%20potential%20impacts%20from%20hazards.
I’m not terribly keen on GDP as the measure, as that’s an annual “value-added” measurement but it does show that weather costs are an absolutely negligible amount each year. They are 0.1% of annual GDP, so a tiny fraction of our accumulated wealth - say that’s around 20 years of GDP, 0.1% of annual GDP is 0.005% of our wealth each year. by contrast, agriculture is around 1.5% of annual GDP, so weather disasters are around 15 times smaller than the contribution agriculture makes. Thus the idea we should reduce agriculture to avoid weather disasters is clearly absurd.
Interested to see that Roger states that:
“Heat waves have large human impacts in Europe and are increasing in frequency due to human-caused climate change”
and refers to a Substack article by his father to explain why.
How Carbon Dioxide Emissions Change the Climate (substack.com)
Another nothingburger for warmists to swallow.
Good morning Paul,
I have a lot of respect for Roger Pielke jr generally but he and his
chums seem to be wedded to the “man-made CO2 is a problem” camp. Any
idea how he comes to this view?
many thanks for you hard work that is much appreciated
John in the Isle of Man – fighting windmills and Net Zero
Off topic, but interesting. I have just been alerted to a website Colchester council Watch, where a group of locals are taking to task the local council on its environmental plans. The locals are much better informed than the councillors. Worth a watch.
There are so many variables, making detailed conclusions problematic. The weather alone doesn’t cause disasters, you have to consider human activities such as building near flood plains, lack of land management and so on.
A local UK example would be the flash flood at Boscastle in 2004. It was dramatic and caused significant damage with 150 vehicles being swept away. £10m was spent on new flood defences but nobody died. However the events at Lynmouth 52 years earlier were catastrophic in terms of casualties, with 34 people losing their lives.
A simple data set of weather measures such as wind speed, precipitation and temperature would give a baseline to make simple observations and analysis devoid of the heretical scaremongering we see too often.
This is an off topic musing.
I read somewhere that the sun’s has had quite a high output comparatively speaking for the last few years. I also read a couple of days later a comment about UHI somewhere. This raised the thought that UHI is largely the result of sunshine with increasing urbanisation and higher solar energy then temperature records will be more and more contaminated.
Just another reason to take any record breaking temperature with a pinch of salt