Climate experts love to compare property damage of recent weather events vs. past weather events – ignoring the fact that there is vastly more property at risk now than there was 100 years ago.
But the same people say that comparing death counts is unfair, because of better communications and weather forecasting.
The death toll in Tacloban last year, was almost identical to the death toll in the 1897 typhoon.
Well, they do adjust it to constant (1997?) dollars. It would be too much to do any of this per capita stuff or account for the multimillion dollar cottages built on those sand dunes known as the NC Outer Banks.
Besides a huge growth in population, spread out over a much larger area, people own vastly more stuff than they did 100 years ago.
Not just more stuff and more expensive stuff, but stuff that cannot be hung out to dry and used again later. A good friend of mine owned a computer business that flooded. When the insurance company contacted him about damages, they told him anything that had a water spot on it must be discarded and replaced, regardless of its location or functionality.
The Amish can replace a destroyed home in day, and often recover much of the contents. There is no comparison.
The population was different too:
Area and population of the world 1890. Rand McNally and Company, 1897
Before air conditioning, the population of the South was much smaller.
Especially in the Southeast.
Hot is bad enough but hot AND humid when it gets over ~ 95°F and over 80% humidity is brutal.
“Learning To Think Like A Climate Expert”
A natural follow-up to; ‘Learning to Commit Fraud Like a Climate Ethicist’
This is all far too logical for a “Climate Expert” to understand!
And the availability of insurance has an impact, too. If you know you will be made whole by insurance, why not build that multimillion dollar house right on the beach so you can get that view? If you were risking your entire net worth, you would build that house further behind the dunes…..