By Jo Nova
The more CO2 we emit, the less we spend on global weather disasters
Fully half of all human emissions of CO2 ever, have been emitted since 1990. This super-molecule was supposed to cause stronger cyclones, nastier storms, more droughts, floods, sea level surges, blizzards, and fires. We were going to save a fortune by installing solar panels and windmills to reduce CO2 and slow the storms. Instead, we make more CO2 than ever, and 34 years of data suggests that the more we make the less we have to spend on flattened or flooded homes.
Munich Re says the world has experienced $298 billion dollars of catastrophic disaster losses due to weather events in 2024. This sounds terrible in terms of mindless “big numbers” , but Roger Pielke Jnr points out that these losses are shrinking in terms of the size of the global economy.
And they are nothing compared to the size of the dead end “transition” spending. Catastrophic weather losses in 2024 “were about 0.26% of global GDP.” We are rebuilding our entire energy system, supposedly to reduce the damage caused by climate change which that hurts one quarter of one percent of our global economy.
The more CO2 we emit, the less we spend on global weather disasters.
For what it’s worth, Pielke notes that “Global Catastrophe Losses” turns out to be in large part due to US Hurricane losses. We can argue the toss about better ways to measure weather related costs, but we can’t argue that the media spins relentlessly one-sided lies about the cost of “climate change”.
If it suited their narrative they could just as easily say “burn oil” and protect us from floods and storms. Or even more easily, since it is true — the rich world survives fires, floods, droughts and storms so much better than the poor world and fossil fuels are unarguably essential to make the concrete, the fertilizer, the planes, and the fuel to power satellites and mobile phones, ambulances and fire trucks.
Fossil fuels made us rich and keeps us safe.
REFERENCES
Pielke, Jr. R. (2019). Tracking progress on the economic costs of disasters under the indicators of the sustainable development goals. Environmental Hazards, 18(1), 1-6.
DATA
56% of all human emissions have occurred in the period from 1990-2024.
Cumulative human emissions of CO2 1990 – 2024 (OWID)
1990: 808.9 billion tons
2023: 1,800 billion tons
2024: (Assume same as 2023 = 1,850 billion tons)
Percentage of human emissions from 1990 – 2024 = 56%
It’s sad we are so heavily, if indirectly, censored by media and by other organisations with huge dollars tied up for profits from changing our energy system. Discussion of matters such as in this article are not tolerated in public. Profits for some (and ideology for many others that would control the world), the already wealthy and powerful, must be paid for by the rest of us. We are forced without a voice to pay the piper as determined by all our governments with lawfare support from our legal system.
We live in a mad world, made wealthy by following logic based on repeatable proof. The same world now refutes the very principles and logic that lay behind our success and instead forces us to become illogical, defy the scientific method (in many fields, especially ethics and social matters) and act on the opinions of a few elitists (what a corrupted word that is) whom we know want to dominate and control the Western world by now proven impoverishment.
What I don’t understand is how we elect so many fools as politicians who see huge power for their deluded selves as the payoff for selling the rest of us out to these international avaricious tyrannical scumbags. How many of them seek UN jobs post local politics for just to be in the mix?
Indeed, the almost total subservience off so many citizens to this holy grail is stunning. The innocence of unquestionably supporting such a position by such a huge number of the best educated and intelligent people in our communities is appalling. Obviously history is a dead topic for such people; they have learned nothing. The ready belief in bizarre social arrangements, historically condemned as antisocial is mind boggling. Shooting a CEO of a Healthcare Company is applauded by many. Gender no longer exists for many; you believe what sex you are and that’s it! Logic, anatomy and biology are disregarded, even legally. Animals before humans; humans are subanimal. Subhumans supported over humans even after a slaughter.
One can only sit back and wonder at the insanity of it all, yet that insanity is imbedded in the most educated and wealthiest human beings that have ever existed on the planet. Is it all because we have lost the idea of basic ethics that have been behind humanity until the last 75years? How are westerners any better than Putin or Xi? I think those ‘elites’ of the Western World are no better. They simply push to destroy us from within while Putin and Xi see the same social disruption through war. Power is the aphrodisiac of them all!
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“Profits for some, and ideology for many others”
To sum it up DOC, there’s two kinds of planet savers. The gullible and the cynical!
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Davefromweewaa, #1.1,
____Went through your village on occasion, carting hay to Tamworth from SA, a few years back.
____One journey, saw a house on the truck route had burned out. Sometime later at Boggabri I grabbed a local paper. Turned out, a ten yo saved her four yo brother from that.
____Good memory.
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Of course nothing is changing, we are just getting smarter at building.
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Climate eats humanitarian money – not defence spending
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Probably the fundamental detachment from reality (the list is long nowadays), is the notion that ‘reducing weather catastrophe’ is an actual thing.
Weather and catastrophe are universally inseparable.
We could reduce the losses by not turning deserts into golf courses and not building mansions on hurricane coasts.
Even such little things as filling reservoirs for suppling fire hydrants to fight fires.
But no.
Maybe the central feature of our destruction …
is that once a quasi religious apocalyptic belief system takes over a culture, all that the pious can see and do must serve fulfillment of prophecy.
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Weather Gods throughout history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_god
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Those weather Gods throughout history… I personally prefer
Zeus the Sky God, (being fond of clouds,) or, (being Aries by birth and red of hair,)
Thor the God of Thunder, kboom!
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All of the above factors could be a source of economic difficulties in the years to come. Indeed, all the elements are present for a perfect economic and financial storm, especially if we add the possible convergence of a monetary crisis, a fiscal crisis and a financial crisis. There are currently too many exuberant speculative bubbles for this not to be a cause for concern. https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-agenda-economic-financial-consequences/5876986 – Climate + AI gonna bubble us all into poverty
40
Thanks Jo for trying to wake us up, but I think our pollies and their so called scientists are a lost cause.
The Albo loony was lying again tonight telling us that extreme weather was getting worse and the Bolta just shook his head.
In fact extreme weather deaths have fallen by 98% and drought deaths by 99.9% since 1920 according to the latest AI tool and OWI Data etc. And Dr Goklany, Lomborg, Co2 Coalition scientists etc have been telling us the same message for decades.
So how did these amazing good things happen in only the last 0.1% of Human history or since the start of the UK’s Industrial Revolution?
For 99.9% of Human history our lives were brutal and short and suddenly our life expectancy is 73 years and much higher for the rich countries.
Does anyone really doubt that we are the luckiest people in Human history?
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On the decrease of damage, I remember one discussion where Dr Richard Lindzen (Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at MIT) said that classical meteorology was that storm likelihood decreased with increasing temperature. Which seems counterintuitive to many.
This has been agreed by Dr. Judith Curry who first gained world fame for the catastrophists when disagreed based on observations and published with the opposite conclusion. And real notoriety when she admitted that on review of the data, she was wrong and the reverse was true.
Now Dr Curry has left the university and she consults privately to corporations that increasing temperatures are due solely to sun activity and ocean currents.
So real meteorology says storms decrease. There is no part of the man made CO2 driven Global Warming story which is true scientifically, but we have had 37 years of political science. It is now a cause celebre of the communists, except in communist countries.
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And it looks like the terrible Los Angeles fires in winter have everything to do with arson, government incompetence, DEI, lack of water and equipment and even the importation of cheap labour which contains criminal elements. To catch an illegal immigrant on parole violation in the area of the fires with a blow torch is damning.
Woke has now cost a straight $150billion in just one city and a score of lives and thousands of homes. The only real change is the political climate and the cheap labour is starting to look very expensive.
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Why has one particular reservoir been empty since 2009? I hope it was not to mitigate co2 emissions. I remember reading several years ago (IIRC at WuWT) about a policy in Kali to reduce the surface area of reservoirs. It seems the Hand Wringers found out that large bodies of water emit c02 as they warm.
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Large bodies of water emit CO2 as they warm? Wow. The real need was to empty the adjacent Pacific ocean. It contains 50% of all the world’s CO2.
So the fires were a result of trying to limit CO2 from water?
I thought the increase in CO2 was due to fossil fuel. Politicians should never be allowed be in charge of science. And the useless and massive UN is the most dangerous group of overpaid failed politicians looking for money and power.
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“To catch an illegal immigrant on parole violation in the area of the fires with a blow torch is damning.”
And yet the woke police let him go, nothing to see here.
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I work in the Insurance Industry which spruiks the folly of ‘Climate Change’ on a regular basis. The point they miss is they have the worlds best records of disasters but still remain blind to reality.
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Anything to demand higher premiums.
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Agree Ronin- that is true; and whilst I am a critic of the industry, they have to make a profit or we all could experience a Lahaina Palisades moment
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When I perform work, I insist on being paid, and I try to get as much money as I can. I assume you do too.
Insurance companies don’t exist to make you more secure. They exist to make money.
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BTW here’s the global OWI Data death rates from natural disasters, but you’ll find it’s mostly droughts and floods.
This is from 1900 to 2024, so very much up to date and every year is shown and you’ll note very few deaths for the last 60 years and very low since 1980.
These are death rates per 100,000 people and every extreme event is active to make it easier to see. Just hold your mouse on droughts or floods etc.
Just more verifiable proof we live in the safest period in our history.
Today we have 8.1 billion and only 2 billion in 1927 and 2.5 bn in 1950 and 4.4 bn in 1980.
Are Albo, B O Bowen, Greens, Teals etc too stupid to look up this data even as they intend to waste trillions $ down the drain for a ZERO return by 2050? And where are our so called scientists?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-natural-disasters?facet=none
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Unfortunately the alarmists will include the cost of the current LA fires and 2025 will show a massive spike, justifying their belief system. They will of course ignore the DEI hirings in the fire brigade, the destruction of dams, the diversion of water that could have helped stem the fires, the lack of managing the fuel loads, and that the winds that fueled the fires have been a feature of California since forever.
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The cost in terms of percentage of global GDP falls and the number of weather-related deaths falls, even as global population increases.
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Their ABC have been yapping about their vile, loony hero Starmer this morning and how he wants to turn the UK into a global AI super power.
You’d think he’d want to spend some money trying to help the elderly and pensioners so they could heat their homes and have enough to eat.
And it’s very hard to run AI with lousy unreliable, toxic W & S. Just ask Bill Gates who intends to start up the 3 mile island Nuclear stn just to run his future AI businesses.
But I’m sure Starmer knows what he’s doing, SARC.
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William Happer says we’ve already painted that post twice with red paint. Putting on another coat will not make it any redder. So, if you go with the CO2 radiative theory ( which I think is a load of junk science crap) adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will make no difference to the world’s temperature. Or cause more California brushfires, Australian bushfires or floods or cyclones.
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Here Elon Musk hands over more Star link terminals to the Los Angeles fire fighters.
There’s hours of this on X, but this is a much shorter version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKwErUxeS00
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To provide power to the Starlink units he’s using Cybertrucks. In fact, he’s advised those who ordered the vehicles that there might be a short delay in supply.
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I know it’s very hard to ask people to look up the data and recently I was called a liar for stating the facts about Aussie death rates from fires and burns since 1980.
Here again is the data and note that Aussies now enjoy about the lowest death rates compared to other cold wealthy countries. Spain and Switzerland are also 0.2 deaths per 100,000.
Australia’s average temp is about 22 C, while Canada is just minus -4 c, USA about 10 c, and Switzerland is about 6 c and Spain about 13 c.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fire-death-rates?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~Low-income+countries~High-income+countries~Upper-middle-income+countries~Lower-middle-income+countries~AUS~CHE~ESP~CAN
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Life on Earth is carbon dependent. The Carbon Cycle shows how CO₂ operates as a vital part. For those tards who think CO₂ is the enemy and we need to de-carbonise I suggest they hold their breath and stop breathing. They won’t last too long because dissolved CO₂ in their blood will cause the automatic respiratory drive to kick in and they will be forced to start breathing. Unfortunately these deluded clowns probably won’t learn anything from this because their brains are the most washed parts of their bodies.
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The narrative about climate change revolves around is climate change an existential threat. Otherwise why would you bother doing anything about it. Saving the planet really means saving humanity. Therefore the trend should be the more CO2 the more people die from climate events. But we know the exact opposite is true and not just a small amount. Deaths from climate events have fallen by over 90% in the last 100 years. The reason is that man has adapted with air conditioning, refrigeration, better farming practices, better warning systems, better building practices, etc. The unequivocal nature of the trend would suggest CO2 is good not bad , the more CO2 the less people die. Properties are rebuilt , peoples lives aren’t. When youre dead it’s a rather permanent state. Even the latest California fires have a death toll of 25(and growing) but not the tens of thousands that might have been in equally populated areas 100 years ago.
One has to remember that this reduction in fatalities over the last hundred years is against a global population that has grown by 400%. Ironically these fires highlight what a totally impotent and useless and costly strategy this fossil fuel/ renewables transition is and that the main cause of climate related deaths is lack of preparedness to put in place measures to keep people safe. Adapt! Adapt! Adapt! And use the money wasted on futile climate measures to better prepare the population for whatever natural disasters Mother Nature might throw at us.
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exactly. It’s a management issue.
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Head Office Experts (HOEs) discover urban heat island effect during one of NZ’s coldest summers in living memory, ever, on record, since last time. Headlines via govt-approved RNZ’s Department of Soma:
Worst start to Wellington’s summer in decade
Passengers warned of more rough swells
NZ set for another cool week – MetService
Some parts are warmer than others [UHI]
Astounding discovery by ‘lead climate resilience advisor’ Petra Pearce that UHI keeps city overnight min 3*C above rural areas, while daytime max can vary by the magic 3 degrees too. Holy fluctuations!
Researcher of all things CCC, Luke Harrington lectures “remember that extreme heat is the deadliest type of climate hazard worldwide” [wrongly] and this is the state of ‘science’ in 2025?
The final headline was a flashback to 1975:
Prices at petrol pump set to get higher.
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Aussies are spending more time online and data use has soared over the last decade. That’s 6 times what it was just 10 years ago and that is expected to double in another 5 years. Obviously unreliable , toxic W & S can’t do the job and we must use only reliable base-load energy for our future energy needs.
Otherwise we’ll fall behind other rich countries and even some other developing countries.
“Australians are spending more time online
“Not only has the number of connected devices increased, but so has the amount of time we spend on the internet in Australia each day.
“In 2013, the average daily time spent online was one hour and 35 minutes.
By 2023, that figure had jumped to six hours and 13 minutes”.
“This uptick in online time means you need fast, reliable internet that can support constant online activities, such as video streaming, video conferencing and gaming. To meet that demand, our nbn® is available with the fastest Australian internet speeds of up to 1 Gbps – more than enough to keep you moving online”.
Australian Internet Usage Trends | Current Facts and Insights
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Here’s the link to the Internet usage story.
https://www.swoop.com.au/blog/australian-internet-usage/
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BTW the coldest temperature of minus -89.2 c ever recorded on Earth was from Antarctica’s Vostok stn in 1983.
But since then satellite temperatures have more recently recorded minus -94 c for much the same area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowest_temperature_recorded_on_Earth
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Here’s Dr Hans Rosling’s BBC Joy of Stats video and only takes 4 + minutes to watch.
It starts in 1810 and finishes in 2009 and plots 120,000 numbers.
None of this amazing increase in health and wealth would’ve been possible without the use of fossil fuels.
And in very short time the need for whale oil was not necessary for lighting etc.
But don’t expect kids to understand this short history lesson and the liars and con merchants continue to teach their ongoing BS and fra-d.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
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I notice he claims the colonial powers exiting third world allowed them to improve. Good stats but his conclusions were pretty poor. Its all because of cheap available energy, but he didn’t mention that. BBC have to put their green left slant on everything
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Last night Andrew Bolt pulled apart Albo’s BS and fra-d about CC and Newscum’s nonsense and the poor little fishy that stuffed up the firefighter’s chances of fighting the fires.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65Dp2kf2REk
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That seems like a lot.
According to Quora the total CO2 in the atmosphere is 2,160 billion metric tons. So the total cumulative emmissions caused by burning fossils fuels so far is about the same as the current CO2 in the atmosphere!
Also the annual CO2 added to the atmosphere is 40 billion tons, which is 2% of the current total CO2 in the atmosphere.
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But, GDP has gone up since 1990. So we are spending more money on losses. Just not as a percentage of GDP.
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