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Roger Pielke Jr.’s Appallingly Bad Analysis of Billion Dollar Disasters

In the world of scientific disinformation, Roger Pielke Jr. is a well known player. A political scientist by training, Pielke has a long history of being a thorn in the side of climatologists who study natural disasters. Pielke’s latest entry in this genre is a 2024 paper called ‘Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters”’. The paper takes aim at the ‘billion-dollar disasters’ dataset run by climatologists at the NOAA. As the name suggests, the database tracks the cost of US weather and climate-related disasters which have inflation-adjusted losses that exceed $1 billion. (Or rather, the database tracked these costs. The billion-dollar-disasters database was recently cancelled by the Trump regime. Afterwards, Pielke took to his blog to celebrate.) Now, my goal here is not to defend the billion-dollar-disasters dataset from Pielke’s criticism. Instead, my aim is to show that Pielke’s analysis is so flawed that it undermines his own appeal ‘scientific integrity’. For his part, Pielke claims that putting climatologists in charge of disaster loss estimation is ‘problematic’, and that the job would be better left to ‘proper economists’. Furthermore, Pielke argues that the

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