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Comment by bigmanwalter | Hacker News Reader

Seeing as the cause of these disasters is economic in nature I fail to see how this is misleading.

Well, if you want to know the total economic loss due to weather, you might also want to e.g. include $900 million events.

If you want to know whether there is more disastrous weather in general, you probably don't want to completely ignore the vast majority of land. (Where destruction amounting to $1 billion is fairly unlikely)

For almost all interesting questions around changing trends in catastrophic weather's effect on the economy, I'd want a different measurement. What would you think, you could use this for?

Tools like these, while perhaps only answering very specific and limited questions, can be really useful when explaining phenomena to decision makers. More often than not (at least in America), the financial impact carries the most weight, particularly to those who might otherwise not care at all about climate change.

But why not make the data as unbiased as possible? Why not show total cost for weather events as a percentage of GDP?

Or if only large-scale catastrophes have increased, the distribution of weather events?

Or maybe the percentage of houses destroyed or the total acres of land rendered temporarily useless?

Or number of weather-related casualties per capita?

While none of those are perfect or complete measurements, they'd all dodge several issues discussed here.

But what conclusion will decisionmakers draw? That climate change is something we need to address urgently, or that our population densities have grown and maybe we need to consider that in disaster planning?

One interpretation implies the weather is getting worse(equally costly stuff). The other implies people just have more costly stuff(same weather pattern).

Both interpretations would be wrong because it's not either or. It's both.

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