A flooded street after Hurricane Irma hit Fort Lauderdale (2017). Source: Shutterstock

Anthony Watts
Date: 14 April 2026

More property

In fact, as updated through 2023, Pielke identifies 62 relevant normalization studies worldwide, and 61 of them make no claims of attribution. Normalization is essential because economic losses increase as societies become wealthier and more built out. A hurricane striking Florida today hits vastly more property than one striking the same coastline in 1950 or earlier. That does not mean the storm is stronger. It means there is more damage because more people have populated coastal areas and more real estate infrastructure exists there compared to decades before. Florida’s population was just over 2.7 million in 1950, but exceeded 23 million by 2024. The number of homes in Florida has grown from roughly 600,000 in 1950 to over 10 million today, leading to a much higher density of assets in high-risk coastal areas.

In a 2022 substack post, Pielke showed how different Miami beach has become in just under 100 years, and how much more infrastructure exists.

Pielke published a second peer-reviewed paper in 2024 in the scientific journal Nature, and included this graph below.

That downward trend is an overwhelming scientific fact against the position the BBC holds.

The BBC article’s trillions-of-dollars claim rests on counterfactual GDP modeling, not on normalized disaster loss data. It extrapolates temperature–GDP relationships and then assigns financial liability across countries. That approach assumes temperature deviations directly and measurably suppresses economic output in a way that compounds over decades. It does not isolate actual disaster damages; it models hypothetical economic worlds.

Vanish

In contrast, normalization studies examine real disaster loss data adjusted for societal growth. When that is done, long-term trends largely vanish.

Pielke is explicit that the lack of detection or attribution in disaster losses does not deny climate change. It simply reflects what the empirical literature shows. There is no statistically robust signal in normalized disaster losses that can be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions.

This is entirely consistent with the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which continues to acknowledge large uncertainties in linking aggregate economic losses to anthropogenic climate change.

Observed normalized disaster losses do not support the claim that the United States is uniquely “paying more than any other country” due to climate change. The growth in economic losses over time is overwhelmingly explained by growth in wealth and exposure.

When peer-reviewed normalization studies are examined collectively, the pattern is clear. There is no detectable, attributable upward trend in disaster losses driven by greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact, U.S. GDP has grown considerably during the recent period of slight global warming. The opposite should be the case if climate change was causing multi-trillion dollar economic losses. In fact, the study can’t tie a single extreme weather event explicitly to human emissions or the losses that were incurred. The losses are all in computer simulations, not borne out in the real world.

Presenting trillion-dollar model outputs as settled economic fact is bad journalism and the BBC should be ashamed for presenting such easily falsified rubbish as fact. That’s the true disaster here.

This article was published first on climaterealism.com on 10 April 2026.