Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. on flood damage: ‘Good news! Long-term trend (1940-2019) is sharply down as a proportion of US GDP’
Pielke Jr.: “How anyone can get away with looking at 29 years of economic data to make claims of attribution is beyond me…At the same time the dramatic reduction in flood losses as a proportion of GDP is a major policy success of the past century…More precip, by itself, means neither more flooding nor more damage.”
By: Marc Morano – Climate DepotJanuary 12, 2021 12:05 PM
Short ?on US flood damage update
Good news!Long-term trend (1940-2019) is sharply down as a proportion of US GDP
Updated from Downton et al 2005: https://t.co/aSGvqLNYDA pic.twitter.com/Hbr25K6OUw
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@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
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@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
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@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
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@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
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) January 12, 2021
PS. More detailsUnderstanding trends in flood damage is _really_ complicatedHere is a framework we published 20 years agohttps://t.co/OiuD3i2hUm pic.twitter.com/FRYvA0MFbf
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@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
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) January 12, 2021
