Although wildfires occur naturally, climate change amplifies their intensity and how quickly they can spread. Meteorologist Chase Cain explains two of the strongest links between climate change and the wildfire emergency in Southern California.
The Los Angeles wildfires were still smoldering when President Donald Trump began Biden-era directives for federal agencies to tackle the climate crisis.
January fire weather conditions driven had helped fuel the Palisades and Eaton wildfires, which razed of land and destroyed tens of thousands of homes across L.A. By March, Adam Smith, then the lead researcher for the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters program under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was still unraveling the sweeping costs of the L.A. wildfires when he was given an informal verbal instruction to halt all communications on his work.
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Every month, Smith’s team updated an expansive online database that tracked losses for over 400 natural disasters going back to 1980, each of which caused damages in excess of $1 billion. In the aftermath of the L.A. wildfires, Smith says the warning restricted him from publishing on the database and sharing preliminary findings with the public: The fires had caused at least $50 billion in damages, a number that would continue to rise.
In early May, Smith resigned from his post over concerns that the agency planned to retire the , a product Smith had developed over his 15-year career with NOAA. Almost a week later, NOAA announced that it would be doing exactly that. The agency stated it would the product, leaving the official price tag for the L.A. wildfires unlisted, and eliminating a valuable data bank regularly used by scientists, citizens and insurance companies assessing climate risk.
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A spokesperson for NOAA said the database would no longer be updated “in alignment with evolving priorities and staffing changes.” The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Smith said the loss of the database is especially significant as billion-dollar disasters like major hurricanes and widespread wildfires become more frequent. In 2023, the U.S. broke its record for most billion-dollar disasters in one year with 28 billion-dollar events, according to the now-archived database. Over the last five years, the U.S. has recorded approximately 24 billion-dollar disasters annually — compared with just three billion-dollar disasters on average per year in the 1980s.
“We have to be more prepared now than ever,” Smith said in an interview with 온라인카지노사이트 News. “And part of that is having data and information and a better understanding of what’s possible. Unfortunately, with products like this one and many others being discontinued … it creates a kind of a vacuum in knowledge.”
Researchers say that over the last few decades, rising global temperatures have been the driving force behind and across the western United States. In cities throughout the U.S., the warming atmosphere is trapping more moisture and creating storms and hurricanes.
The uptick in extreme weather poses a serious risk to the insurance industry and to policyholders living in places vulnerable to natural disasters. Extreme weather exacerbated by climate change is in hurricane-prone states like Louisiana and Florida, where a homeowner might pay almost $10,000 in annual premiums. California is experiencing a major insurance crisis as big-name insurers like State Farm are because of elevated fire risk.
Researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research projected that growing disaster risk would by $700 over the next 30 years. On the global scale, a report from German found that in 2024, natural disasters caused a record-breaking $140 billion in insured losses around the world.
“There’s no way to hide the costs of climate change from people who are already paying for it through their insurance premiums,” said Carly Fabian, a policy advocate with Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer rights group. “Insurance and reinsurance industries are designed to withstand a limited number of large, multibillion-dollar disasters. They’re not designed to withstand back-to-back disasters with this level of frequency.”
The data stored in the billion-dollar disaster database, which illustrates the monetary cost of hurricanes, severe storms and wildfires across the country, is a key input for private insurance companies modeling climate risk and setting rates for homeowners living in vulnerable communities. While insurance companies use a variety of data sets for their proprietary climate risk models, the scale of NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster database is not replicable by private entities, she said.
Jeremy Porter, a climate risk expert at First Street Foundation, a firm that models climate risk for insurers, companies and government agencies, said that the database was one of the most effective tools for illustrating the impact of climate-driven disasters on the U.S. economy. Porter said First Street uses the billion-dollar disaster database for its national risk assessment reports.
The NOAA database is also an important tool for homeowners who are facing rate hikes, nonrenewals and cancellations to their home insurance policies.
“We’re dealing with a situation in the industry where there’s a real information asymmetry, where insurers have a lot of access to privatized data and actual consumers don’t have access to that data as well,” said Alex Martin, a policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit group that pushes for stricter regulations of corporations. “Getting rid of the public sources of data is going to exacerbate that asymmetry and make it a lot harder for people across the country to understand their risks — to understand why they’re being treated the way they are by their financial service providers.”
Madison Condon, a professor of environmental law at Boston University, said the cuts to the NOAA billion-dollar disaster database are the latest in a series of rollbacks on data products that insurers rely on, including the National Climate Assessment, an annual report on the impact of climate change in the U.S. In late April, Trump all the scientists working on the report from their posts.
The Trump administration has also documenting melting glaciers and sea ice cover in the Antarctic, the latest in a series of blows to U.S.. According to a leaked memo , Trump plans to cut NOAA funding by 27%, focusing on slashing projects related to climate change — with the deepest cuts, almost 75%, planned for the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which produces and maintains global climate models routinely used by insurers to assess climate risk.
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