Just about every type of extreme weather event is becoming less frequent and less severe in recent years as our planet continues its modest warming in the wake of the Little Ice Age. While global warming activists attempt to spin a narrative of ever-worsening weather, the objective facts tell a completely different story.

The above article is from 2013 article provides hard data that extreme weather events are becoming less, not more, frequent and severe. That trend continues today. So the premise that weather events are getting “increasingly unprecedented" is demonstrably false. What is true is that cost of extreme weather events has gone up, but that’s a function of population density, not of weather itself, nor of climate change.

The data that climate alarmists most often cite to bolster the false narrative of increasing severe weather is the “Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster Events” chart:

The worst event ever, at $170B, was the merely Cat3 hurricane Katrina. It caused $170B in damage because it hit the highly dense New Orleans urban center. Yet the massively more severe Cat5 hurricane Michael, which hit a much less population-dense Mexico Beach, FL, caused only $25B in damage. Weather intensity doesn’t correlate with damage costs. Population does.

Knowing accurately the true trend of severe weather is important to NANOG operational planning, because it bears directly on the cost/benefit analysis of infrastructure hardening. Physical integrity is always a function of cost vs benefit, and we as network operators can’t afford to spend “unprecedented" sums for diminishing benefits. We must use facts, not alarmism, to decide on what we should "probably get ready for”.

-mel

On Feb 22, 2021, at 9:18 AM, Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 12:23:22PM +0000, Bret Clark wrote:

Texas doesn't generally experience this type of extreme cold.

That was then; this is now.

As scientist Jeff Masters put it most of a decade ago:

The atmosphere I grew up with no longer exists. My new motto
with regards to the weather is, "expect the unprecedented."

In the years since he's said that we've seen a number of unprecedented
events: Sandy, Harvey, California wildfires, last year's midwest derecho,
and so on. This event in Texas is just another one; there will be more;
they'll get worse.

We should probably get ready for that.

---rsk