‘Incontrovertibly false’: Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. Fact checks the ‘self-appointed climate fact-checkers’ & finds them DEAD WRONG

🧵Fact checking self-appointed climate fact checkers

@ClimateFdbk Kerry Emanuel claims:
“economic damage, normalized by world domestic product… from weather-related natural disasters have been increasing greatly” (full quote below)

This is incontrovertibly false
Evidence next

Here is the actual trend in economic damage normalized by global GDP, 1990-2019

Contrary to Emanuel’s claims, this metric is not “increasing greatly” (actually it is not even increasing)

In fact, every study that has looked at global economic losses after normalization (for GDP or other factors) has consistently failed to identify any increase in losses at all (table from Pielke 2021, in press

)

This is why the IPCC Special Report on Extreme Events concluded (on a much thinner evidence base) that “long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”

Kerry Emanuel has every right to his opinions, of course

But he should attend to his own factual accuracy before claiming (falsely) that “@ShellenbergerMD statement is not defensible” & “is patently false”

For @ClimateFdbk this is easily 5 Pinocchios
🤥🤥🤥🤥🤥

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Emanuel writes: “there is strong and mounting evidence that climate change is increasing… the incidence of strong hurricanes”

Yet a recent WMO assessment polled its authors & concluded (image) no increase (so how can there be more disasters?)

A co-author? Emanuel