» Global and Regional Economic Losses from Weather Events

Natural Hazards Review,  February 2014 / Reconciliation of Trends in Global and Regional Economic Losses from Weather Events by Roger A. Pielke, Jr.

In recent years claims have been made in venues including the authoritative reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in testimony before the US Congress that economic losses from weather events have been increasing beyond that which can be explained by societal change, based on loss data from the reinsurance industry and aggregated since 1980 at the global level. Such claims imply a contradiction with a large set of peer-reviewed studies focused on regional losses, typically over a much longer time period, which concludes that loss trends are explained entirely by societal change. Read More…