Media Selection Bias is One Reason Many People Have a False Impression of Increasing Extreme Weather
The media will breathlessly promote stories about any weather event in tail of the distribution curve. I have written many times that this creates a false impression that these events are becoming more common. Another element of this selection bias is what gets left out. Does anyone doubt that if we were having a record-heavy tornado season, this would be leading every newscast? If but if a record-heavy year is newsworthy, shouldn't a record-light year be newsworthy as well? Apparently not:
Which reminds me of this chart Kevin Drum had the other day as "proof" of man-made climate change
I am not going to bother to go to their data source and pick it apart, though my guess is that I could. But without even looking at the data sources I know this is garbage. Think about places where there are large natural disasters in the US -- two places that come to mind are California fires and coastal hurricanes. Do you really think that the total property value in California or on the US coastline has grown only at inflation? You not only have real estate price increases, but you have the value of new construction. The combination of these two is WAY over the 2-3% inflation rate. This effect is magnified by the nature of the metric, which is not total losses but losses over some threshold. This sort of threshold metric is easy to game, and says nothing for the total losses which would be a better measurement.
By the way, I am wondering how he automatically blames all of these natural disasters on manmade climate change. Take the most recent, disastrous fires that hit the Redding, California area this year. That fire started on BLM (federal) land. When it was small, California State Fire (CalFire) personnel showed up to put it out. The BLM told them to go away. The chance to put the fire out when it was small was lost. How do you blame a fire that was really due to moronic intergovernmental rivalry and bad forest management policy on climate change?
I won't repeat the charts but this post has charts on many extreme weather events and shows that, with the exception of large rainfall events, there is no trend in any of them.
