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NOAA Retires Extreme Weather Database (cnn.com) 129

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday its well-known "billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" database "will be retired," a move that will make it next to impossible for the public to track the cost of extreme weather and climate events. The weather, climate and oceans agency is also ending other products, it has recently announced, due in large part to staffing reductions. NOAA is narrowing the array of services it provides, with climate-related programs scrutinized especially closely.

The disasters database, which will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024, has allowed taxpayers, media and researchers to track the cost of natural disasters -- spanning extreme events from hurricanes to hailstorms -- since 1980. Its discontinuation is another Trump-administration blow to the public's view into how fossil fuel pollution is changing the world around them and making extreme weather more costly. [...]

The database vacuums loss information from throughout the insurance industry, among other public and private sources. According to the database, there were 403 weather and climate disasters totally at least $1 billion in the United States since 1980, totaling more than $2.945 trillion. As of April 8, there had not been any confirmed billion-dollar disasters so far in 2025, but it lists four events as having the potential to make the tally, including the Los Angeles-area wildfires in January. Between 1980 and 2024, there were nine such disasters on average each year, though in the past five years, that annual average has jumped to 24. The record for one year was 28 events in 2023.
"What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and non-public data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers," Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications for and co-founder of First Street, a climate risk financial modeling firm, told CNN via email.

"Without it, replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models."

NOAA Retires Extreme Weather Database

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  • When does it stop? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Thursday May 08, 2025 @11:36PM (#65363083)

    I just read an article that was 'hopeful', pointing out Trump is losing more cases than winning that are brought against him because of the government's actions. Show me the parts of his agenda that are good for Americans, where a win for him isn't a loss for everyone else.

    Free press, an impartial adversarial judicial system, due process... pretty much everything Americans have held as necessary to their pursuit of happiness is being destroyed while those who aren't cheering it on sit idly by.

    You're less than a couple of years away from being in a Russian oligarchy. Maybe far less. The market pain is going to start hitting hard in a few weeks, and it's not going to let up. They're going to try and blame others to solidify their grip on power. New groups will be chosen as the scapegoat and persecuted.

    This is the future of the US, because nobody wants to pay the price of fighting tyranny if they still have hope somebody else will do the bleeding for them. I can't fight for you, I'm busy worrying my country will be selected as your next external 'enemy' and then I'm going to have to fight and it won't be FOR you.

    • It doesn't (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday May 08, 2025 @11:56PM (#65363103)
      Trump can basically do anything he wants and no one can stop him because the only serious threat to his power is that the Democrats would win in a landslide taking a supermajority in the Senate.

      In order for that to happen the Democrats would have to wield the power they have in order to shut down voter suppression. This would involve basically ignoring court orders as needed in order to ram voting rights cases up to State supreme courts where they have majorities.

      They absolutely have the power to do it but the problem is the kind of centrist Democrat who would be in charge of doing it does not under any circumstances want to wield power. They are obsessed with proprietary and process and procedure believing it is sacred above All Else.

      Now ordinarily what would happen is the left wing of the party and the left wing Independence would give them a kick in the rear and they would get off their asses and wield the power and solve this problem.

      The problem with that is the left wing doesn't really want to stop voter suppression. They have a childish dream of kids 18 to 24 showing up to vote in droves and instituting Nordic style Democratic socialist reforms. They have literally been trying to achieve that for so long that the 18 to 24 set they originally started working on are in their 60s and voted overwhelmingly for Trump...

      Basically we are a nation of 12-year-olds. We act like children. Left right up down center doesn't matter who it is we stopped maturing at around age 12, some of us make it all the way to 14 and then that's it. So it's extremely hard for any of us to do what really needs to be done to save our country's democracy.

      It's possible to share incompetence of Donald Trump and everyone around him might save us again but it seems unlikely. I suspect the whole country is going to turn into a fascist dictatorship like China and or Russia. I hope my kid can flee the country when it happens and that Europe has enough nukes that still work to keep the US military at Bay. I'm also hoping to die before the worst of it.

      Would love to be proven wrong but I have watched these last several months as the lefties and the centrists uselessly bicker over specific policy and do absolutely nothing about democracy. Every now and then one of the lefties realizes how fuck they are and does a screed about how we're going to all use violence to get back democracy. They're 12-year-olds but they're not that dumb they know it won't work. But the alternative is giving up that stupid cherished dream of theirs. and they're hobbyists in it for the fun so that's not going to happen.
      • >Every now and then one of the lefties realizes how fuck they are and does a screed about how we're going to all use violence to get back democracy.

        It'll happen... Eventually, when things are bad enough they can no longer fool themselves into thinking there is a choice, the sheep will fight back.

        The US isn't Russia. It has a long cultural history of prosperity and resentment and selfishness, and you can't just rip that away and put a boot on its neck without pushback. There's a whole generation of ang

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          There's a whole generation of angry young men having their futures torn away,

          Democrats have been in the White House for 12 of the past 16 years ...

          only unlike the MAGAs they're not ignorant and gullible. But they will grow up with an intense burning hatred of the right wing and nothing to lose...

          Yeah, this goes a long way toward explaining why Donald Trump's support increased among this demographic group (see above about 12 of 16 years). Go look it up, I'll wait.

          Don't blame me, I've voted Green (or for Bernie) for years.

          • by Phact ( 4649149 )

            Yeah thank goodness the greens have really taken point in the battle against the administrations lawlessness. I can't wait to read all about their next court challenge to the unlawful deportations of American citizens. They're really fighting for us! You can see it everywhere: in all the community outreach they do, and all the friend of the court briefs they file. They're always there at the forefront, to defend working citizens against tyrannical government overreach, and the way they jumped to defend pres

          • And you're the hostage.

            It doesn't matter if the Democrats hold the White House. They have not once had a supermajority in the Senate and without that they are basically powerless. And two years after any election they take the White House voters being dumb as dishwater and a nation of 12-year-olds hands Congress to the Republican party. Idiots do this on purpose because they think creating gridlock will protect them.

            The Republican party then uses the budget negotiation process to threaten to crash
            • Thank you, Captain Cop-Out.

              This is of course a reframing of Obama's "it's a large ship with a small rudder" excuse. I am super unhappy that Trump is once again the president, but he is making a mockery of these flaccid arguments about supermajorities and such by getting an incredible number of things done with only the thinnest of majorities in Congress. For that matter, Bill Clinton was able to Get Shit Done even after the Contract With America disaster in 1994.

              I voted for Obama in 2008 and consider
        • "There's a whole generation of angry young men having their futures torn away, only unlike the MAGAs they're not ignorant and gullible"

          Wat

      • No, it really doesn’t. And neither does your post. What it does is hijack a discussion about the loss of a vital climate data resource—critical to public safety and long-term economic planning—and derail it into a jaded screed about how “everyone is too immature to save democracy.” It’s a logic fire sale: false dilemmas, bad-faith assumptions, historical revisionism, and a parade of straw men so dense they’d block NOAA radar. You hijacked a vital discussion about th

    • When you put your shit together and do something about it.

    • by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 ) on Friday May 09, 2025 @01:36AM (#65363219) Journal

      You're less than a couple of years away from being in a Russian oligarchy.

      You're optimistic, I was thinking more like North Korea....

    • Free press

      Where is the press in the US not free? Who is being arrested? Which papers and TV networks are being shut down?

      an impartial adversarial judicial system

      LOL, you have to be fucking kidding me. We've NEVER had an "impartial" judicial system. Judges are either appointed by partisan means or by the so-called "Missouri Plan", which is a farce because it basically turns selection of judges over to trial lawyers [wikipedia.org]. Going to court has always been a crapshoot, which is why virtually everyone that can do so tries to go jurisdiction-shopping to get the friendl

      • Where does the Constotion says due process is for citizens only? Article 5 explicitly says due process applies to all people. There's no citizen vs non-citizen distinction when it comes to it.

        And that's no accident. Weren't for it, a government could declare any person they wanted to disappear as being non-citizens, and they'd have no recourse, as there would be no court to even hear their argument that they're actually indeed citizens.

        Which is precisely why the government is arguing, contrary to what the C

    • Has been on the correct side since Nixon.
  • You are on your own for the next 4 years, longer unless a miracle happens because voter suppression means the Republicans are likely to win and Trump is likely to get a third term.

    This means that if a storm destroys your property there isn't going to be anything there to rebuild it. The insurance companies you're paying out so much money to will go under or they will Stonewall you with lawsuits you can't possibly win. The courts are packed with pro corporate judges so you are unlikely to get very far.
  • Don't even bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by denny_deluxe ( 1693548 ) on Thursday May 08, 2025 @11:58PM (#65363107)
    1/3 of you voted for it, and 1/3 of you couldn't get off your fat asses to vote against it. So suck it up, and enjoy the shitty consequences of your shitty actions.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      We've neglected our democracy for far too long and we're going to lose this republic.

    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      Considering the only corporate- and genocide-friendly alternative we were allowed to vote for, voter apathy is understandable. As someone here said about the 2016 election, "If two people are sawing my legs off why do you expect me to thank the one who's doing it slower?"

    • 1/3 of you couldn't get off your fat asses to vote against it.

      Thanks for blaming the victims of a system that is specifically designed to prevent them from voting. Go fuck yourself.

    • We make it very very hard to vote in America. If we didn't the Republican party wouldn't exist.
  • Same as Covid (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 09, 2025 @01:08AM (#65363183)

    Stop counting, and the numbers don't get any bigger.

    What if we just stop counting the national debt? Can we keep spending like drunken sailors?

    • Re:Same as Covid (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gtall ( 79522 ) on Friday May 09, 2025 @04:52AM (#65363401)

      "What if we just stop counting the national debt?" This is precisely what la Presidenta was suggesting back in Nov.-Dec. in the guise of increasing the debt limit by about $5 trillion if memory serves correct. That was just to grease the skids so that Congress could slide down to another $5 trillion in a year's time.

      You want the U.S. to stop spending like a drunken sailor? Start by rescinding the Bush and la Presidenta tax cuts thus cutting the yearly deficit, start taxing the wealthy and polluting industries like they deserve so we do not lose productivity to environmental damage, fund education and science and health care so that people are not creating a hit on the health programs after waiting until they are at death's door before they can get any help (i.e., vaccines, gov. research on vaccines and cancer). And start increasing our reliance on renewables and stop contributing to global warming which is creating weather related disasters.

      The way to decrease spending is to make smart investments. The U.S. junta and the Maggots do not understand that.

      • The U.S. junta and the Maggots do not understand that.

        You can't make a man understand something when his whole identity is built around not understanding it. Anti-intellectualism is the only thing they all have in common.

      • The way to decrease spending is to make smart investments. The U.S. junta and the Maggots do not understand that.

        The Democrats don't understand that either... which is why we are where are. Money and the love of money has turned this country inside out. There is no recovery possible until total collapse, and then, we likely will not be the USA anymore, we will be a subsidiary of Russia or China.

        Money is a hell of a drug.

  • by denelson83 ( 841254 ) on Friday May 09, 2025 @02:01AM (#65363261)

    This was done to protect the fossil fuel industry...!

  • by sir_smashalot_3rd ( 8248420 ) on Friday May 09, 2025 @04:36AM (#65363373)
    obituary in my lifetime. This relentless assault on everything that is sensible, doing something good and actually delivers more value than it costs should be stopped asap. How the American people chose this man as their president for the second time I will never understand, let alone why they do not stop him right f'ing now.
    • Luigi mangione tried to stop someone like him. How is that going for him?
      • He was successful?
        • If that is a question, then the answer is no. He may be in prison for life.
          • Depends on his goals. If his goal was to kill an evil healthcare exec, he succeeded. If he intended to remain free afterwards, not so much.

            I don't know that I can agree that his vigilante action was justified - he killed a man not involved in his personal suffering - but overlooking that part, some goals require sacrifice to achieve. Maybe he feels his freedom was a price worth paying.

            • We have gotten off the point I think. The original comment was why more people don't do this. I was giving the answer... Because no one is willing to give up the freedom they currently have left to change things, like Luigi was. The line Trump is trying to walk keeps those people who may sacrifice their freedom totally clueless until it is too late.
        • Was he? Mangione took out one of the cogs in the machine. He didn't break the machine or even significantly alter its functioning.

          What would happen to the MAGA movement without Trump? I don't claim to know. Maybe it would eat itself. Maybe it'd continue doing damage under its own momentum.

      • Luigi killed a man who needed killing, but A) it wasn't a guy involved in Luigi's healthcare issues and B) he's only one person.

        Ideally, the threat of violence gets the job done, and you're going to need a big mob ready to take on a lot of targets. One vigilante isn't fixing your problems, you need a big cultural movement. One where everyone understands what's at stake and is ready to sacrifice their finances, freedoms, and lives. It's a big ask, but the outcome is worse if it doesn't get done.

    • The American people didn't choose him. The American process did. The American process doesn't need the average American to do anything and in fact, does everything possible to prevent the average American from participating. That doesn't include any of the outright fraud.

      • The American people didn't choose him. The American process did

        You DO know, that Trump won the popular vote in addition to winning the electoral college, right?

        He won every swing state....etc.

        Seems the American people DID choose him....

        • We sure did choose him and now we have to live with the consequences of that result.

          Frankly that what is needed, for people to feel the consequences of their decisions, maybe that is the prosperity promised or maybe it's suffering but we need to feel it.

          • by Chaset ( 552418 )

            This is the point that is missed a lot in discussions. These "low information voters" are like petulant toddlers. They would have kicked, screamed and raised hell to be allowed to touch the figurative stove. IF Harris had won, we may have had a lot of violent, destructive protests in our hands, not just in the Capital. I felt consolation in that in one sense, we needed to let them touch the stove and feel for themselves the consequence of their actions. Otherwise, they would have raised hell and kept t

            • The handlers thing was Trump 1 and he made sure this time he wouldn't run into that again, he found even more shameless and more sycophantic people this time (I mean Janine Pierro is our new interim DC Attorney and she might actually be a slight improvement over Ed Martin).

              The only silver lining is he burned through most of the qualified Republicans willing to work with him the first go round, no more Mnuchin or Mattis, the crew we have now, as we are seeing, are looking pretty incompetent, even Rubio who w

  • This isn't the database you can go to and see every path of every storm ever is it? If so, what an incredible loss this is.
  • all you have to do is stop keeping track of the weather and sing happy songs and everything will be just fine!

  • What else could they have cut? Probably a lot. But this, seems designed to piss people off, not actually cut out waste.
  • Ripe story, but no jokes? Sadness.

    Not a bad discussion, but "loss of agency" is my basic response.

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