Today, npj Natural Hazards, a journal in the Nature family of journals, officially published my new paper, “Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters.”
The paper shows — irrefutably in my view — that the “billion dollar disaster” tabulation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), fails to meet the agency’s standards for information quality and scientific integrity.1
For reasons I describe in detail in the paper, the “billion dollar disaster” tabulation is not suitable as a “database” (scare quotes — it is not data by any standard) for the detection and attribution of trends in extreme weather. Similarly, the tabulation is not suitable for identifying the consequences of changes or variability in climate on the costs of disasters. The dataset has been widely misused inscience, by the media, and in policy.
It is, in a word, misinformation.2
Here is how the paper starts:
In the late 1990s, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began publishing a tally of weather and climate disasters that each resulted in more than $1 billion in damage, noting that the time series had become “one of our more popular web pages”1. Originally, the data was reported in current-year U.S. dollars. In 2011, following criticism that the dataset was misleading, NOAA modified its methods to adjusted historical losses to constant-year dollars by accounting for inflation.
By 2023, the billion dollar disaster time series had become a fixture in NOAA’s public outreach, was highlighted by the U.S. government’s U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) as a “climate change indicator,” was a cited as evidence in support of a “key message” of the Fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment showing that “extreme events are becoming more frequent and severe.” The time series is often cited in policy settings as evidence of the effects of human-caused climate change to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and associated economic damage, including in federal agencies, Congress and by the U.S. President. In addition to being widely cited in justifications of policy, as of March, 2024, NOAA’s billion dollar dataset has been cited in almost 1000 articles according to Google Scholar.
NOAA’s “billion dollar disaster” tabulation began as a simplistic but clever way to market NOAA and to attract the attention of reporters with a clickbaity listicle. At some point along the way, the “billion dollar disaster” list was somehow transformed into “data” used in peer-reviewed research, an official indicator of human-caused climate change featured by the U.S. National Climate Assessment, and used by the administration of President Joe Biden to justify a wide range of regulations and policy.
It is a remarkable story of how science can get off track and how misinformation can exist in plain sight, just like the emperor’s new clothes.
Hellbound and Down 