The Biden administration relied on tainted, inaccurate, misleading and self-serving data analysis to claim storms are becoming more extreme and expensive due to climate change, according to a non-partisan watchdog group.
Protect the Public’s Trust cited a new study that combed through data used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for its climate and disaster tracking project and found it inflated damages and made inexplicable data calculations that did not factor in obvious contributions to disaster costs, such as an increase in development in coastal regions and other areas vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding or wildfires.
Most recently, NOAA ballooned the cost of damages from Hurricane Idalia, an August 2023 storm that impacted the southeastern part of the United States.
While insured losses from wind damage and flooding totaled $310 million through mid-November of 2023, NOAA estimated the storm caused losses of $3.6 billion, or 12 times the damage covered by insurance.
Idalia’s steep costs were included in NOAA’s Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters tracking project, which has been used by the Biden administration to push its climate change agenda by saying weather events are becoming much more severe and costly, to the tune of billions of dollars in damages each year.
The NOAA data was cited in a November 2023 Biden-Harris administration “fact sheet” justifying $6 billion in new spending to combat climate change and advance “environmental justice.”
The administration cited the NOAA figures in claiming the U.S. set a record in 2023 for the number of climate disasters that cost more than $1 billion and that the nation now experiences a billion-dollar disaster every three weeks on average compared to once every four months during the 1980s.
“Every degree of global warming we avoid matters because each increment of warming is expected to lead to more damage and greater economic losses in the United States. Each climate action taken to reduce and avoid warming reduces those risks and harmful impacts,” Biden administration officials said in the announcement.
According to NOAA’s assessment, from 1980 to 2023 there were 8.5 weather disasters on average annually that caused losses exceeding $1 billion. The number surged to 20.4 billion-dollar weather disasters in the last five years, NOAA calculated.
But NOAA’s data doesn’t add up or does not include enough information to explain why it inflated some costs well beyond the initial assessment made by insurers and NOAA’s own National Hurricane Center, critics said.
“It’s an influential data set that is being used to guide policy,” Protect the Public’s Trust Director Michael Chamberlain told The Washington Times. “The danger is if the data is not correct, if they’re not following the correct policy in their analysis, and if they are not driven by the scientific integrity that they’re supposed to, there’s a huge danger that it could drive that policy off course and in the wrong direction.”
Protect the Public’s Trust requested NOAA’s scientific integrity officer investigate their complaint, which cites numerous examples of questionable data and lack of scientific integrity.
Much of the data questioning NOAA came from a paper written by University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr., who has researched and written extensively on climate change and has raised questions about efforts to tie it to hurricanes, floods and other significant weather events.
Mr. Pielke published a January 2024 paper criticizing the data in NOAA’s weather-related disaster tracking and called on the agency to address questions about its accuracy.
“Because of the shortfalls in scientific integrity documented in this evaluation, policymakers and the public have been grossly misinformed about extreme events and disasters in the United States,” Mr. Pielke wrote.
The paper has not yet been peer reviewed.
A spokeswoman for NOAA told The Times it does not comment on “ongoing scientific integrity complaints.”
In January 2023, NOAA applied climatologist and economist Adam Smith, who oversees the annual “Billion-dollar disaster report,” used the data to justify his claim to CBS News that “climate change is supercharging many of these extremes that can lead to billion-dollar disasters.”
NOAA scales up insurance loss damages to include uninsured and underinsured damages, officials said, but Mr. Pielke criticized NOAA for failing to provide enough details on how they calculate the changes.
NOAA also fails to explain why it removed and added events to its disaster timeline.
“There is no justification for such changes,” Mr. Pielke wrote. “I am only aware of them through happenstance of downloading the currently available dataset at different times.”
The NOAA data also show the number of disasters ranging from $1 billion to $2 billion sharply increased beginning in 2008. NOAA appears to have changed how it accounts for disasters beginning in 2008, but the agency does not provide a detailed accounting for why officials made those changes.
In all cases except 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, NOAA”s billion-dollar disaster estimates are “substantially higher” than the National Hurricane Center’s original estimates adjusted for inflation, Mr. Pielke wrote.
Hurricane Harvey, which struck Texas in 2017, was initially estimated to have caused $60 billion in damage at the time, which is $74 billion in 2023 dollars.
A 2018 NOAA estimate raised Harvey’s damages, much of it caused by catastrophic flooding, to $125 billion.
In NOAA’s 2023 billion dollar disaster database, the cost of Harvey inflated again to more than $156 billion, an increase of 209% over the original estimate.
The data justifying the increases, Mr. Pielke said, are impossible to verify because they lack transparency.
NOAA also fails to quantify the impact of population increases and expensive developments in coastline areas and other places vulnerable to wind, flooding and fire damage, other than calling them “an important factor for higher damage potential.”
NOAA officials said they calculate billion-dollar losses with statistics from more than one dozen public and private sector data sources and that the costs include insured and uninsured losses.
Mr. Chamberlain wrote to NOAA’s scientific integrity officer, Cynthia J. Decker, and Commerce Department acting Inspector General Roderick Anderson that NOAA’s taxpayer-funded research on weather disaster costs lacks scientific integrity and needs to be investigated.
“The national conversation on climate change and disaster response should not be tainted by inaccurate, misleading and self-serving scientific analysis,” he wrote.