Europe’s “Soaring Climate Damage” Narrative Runs Into an Inconvenient Dataset
17 hours ago Anthony Watts
One of the most persistent claims in climate politics is that weather disasters are becoming increasingly expensive because climate change is making extreme weather worse. The assertion has been repeated so often by politicians and echoed so faithfully by much of the media that it has taken on the appearance of established fact. Recently, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. wrote up a revealing post on substack titled: Europe’s Weather Losses Keep Climbing – But a new loss normalization finds no trend after accounting for economic growth.
Some excerpts and analysis follow.
European Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra recently declared, “The reality is that as climate change continues, the pattern of more heat waves, more droughts, more heavy weather, and of course also more floods is going up… you will see more damage… the ever-larger economic damage that climate change… is bringing to our societies.”
It certainly sounds convincing. Unfortunately for that narrative, Roger Pielke Jr. has once again done what too few economists bother to do: examine the data before accepting the conclusion. Pielke’s latest analysis, based on newly updated catastrophe loss data from the European Environment Agency (EEA), finds that once economic growth is properly accounted for, Europe’s weather-related disaster losses have remained essentially flat since 1990.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/07/03/europes-soaring-climate-damage-narrative-runs-into-an-inconvenient-dataset/
