Greater Hurricane Damage Caused by Population Shifts

The NOAA released a study Thursday which you aren’t going to read much about in the MSM. The study concludes that the greater hurricane damage we are seeing in coastal areas is due to population shifts to those areas rather than more or bigger hurricanes. So the greater damage is due to demographic shifts. Here’s a link to the actual paper. This basically says that a much of the damage increase that we are seeing is due to inflation and more people living in coastal regions – wingnut denialists everywhere are trying to make this out to mean that there’s no AGW, when all actual measure of climate indicate that there is AGW. This paper just means that as sea levels rise we are going to see even more damage than expected.

There’s also some concern in scientific circles regarding the sunspot cycle – normally this would have started in March last year, but so far it’s been a bust with only one abortive sunspot in early Feb this year. The sun is remarkably quiet, and we could be headed into another minimum. The record cools we are seeing recently are anecdotal so far, but they could be indicative of things to come.

Update 5/1/14 – I’ve updated this after finally tracking down the actual paper – the paper doesn’t indicate or say that the damage isn’t because of AGW, it merely states that we are seeing more costs due to several factors. Costs aren’t a measure of AGW, but it’s somewhat likely that we will see costs rise as AGW does.