Good news! The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will stop its long tradition of tracking and publicizing billion-dollar weather disasters, which means, of course, that they won’t happen anymore. Hurrah!
The National Centers for Environmental Information — which, you might recall, got knocked offline for a while last year by the climate change-juiced power of Hurricane Helene — has hosted the billion-dollar disasters data, which goes back to 1980. It offers a succinct view of the increasing costs of the hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires, and more — but not anymore, because as the Trump administration is proving again and again across the government, if you don’t track something, it doesn’t exist.
The database, which experts called the “gold standard” for tracking major disasters and likely can’t be replicated by private sources with more narrow access to information, will apparently be archived. The move, a NOAA spokesperson said, is “in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.”
The resulting end in ultra-expensive catastrophes will come as an enormous relief, given what we’ve seen in recent years. In 2024, according to the NCEI data, there were 27 billion-dollar events costing almost $183 billion in total; over the entire period from 1980 to the present, the country averaged nine such disasters per year, at an average cost of $64.8 billion with 376 deaths each year. But things have been getting worse: over the last five years, we have averaged 23 events per year at a cost of just under $150 billion. Over just the last three, we got up to 24.3 events at $153.9 billion, with more than 500 people dying in the disasters per year.
But no more! With our heads safely in the sand, no disaster will cost a billion dollars ever again.
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