As part of the 2nd edition of my Kindle e-book Inevitable Disaster: Why Hurricanes Can’t Be Blamed On Global Warming (which should go live tonight), I include the following graph, based upon data in a January 2018 U.S. Government report. In the top panel we see that the average monetary damages of the 30 most costly hurricane disasters in U.S history has gone up dramatically in recent decades. But in the 2nd panel we see that the average intensity of those 30 most costly storms has not increased.

The increasing number of “damaging” storms in recent decades is, of course, an artifact of the increasing monetary damages with time: only the 30 most costly storms are included. Of course, this is what Roger Pielke, Jr. has been saying for years.