US will stop tracking the costs of extreme weather fueled by climate
change
[May 09, 2025]
By ALEXA ST. JOHN
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will no longer track
the cost of climate change-fueled weather disasters, including floods,
heat waves, wildfires and more. It is the latest example of changes to
the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government
resources on climate change.
NOAA falls under the U.S. Department of Commerce and is tasked with
daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and climate monitoring.
It is also parent to the National Weather Service.
The agency said its National Centers for Environmental Information would
no longer update its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters
database beyond 2024, and that its information — going as far back as
1980 — would be archived.
For decades, it has tracked hundreds of major events across the country,
including destructive hurricanes, hail storms, droughts and freezes that
have totaled trillions of dollars in damage.
The database uniquely pulls information from the Federal Emergency
Management Agency’s assistance data, insurance organizations, state
agencies and more to estimate overall losses from individual disasters.
NOAA Communications Director Kim Doster said in a statement that the
change was “in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates,
and staffing changes.”
Scientists say these weather events are becoming increasingly more
frequent, costly and severe with climate change. Experts have attributed
the growing intensity of recent debilitating heat, Hurricane Milton, the
Southern California wildfires and blasts of cold to climate change.
Assessing the impact of weather events fueled by the planet's warming is
key as insurance premiums hike, particularly in communities more prone
to flooding, storms and fires. Climate change has wrought havoc on the
insurance industry, and homeowners are at risk of skyrocketing rates.
One limitation is that the dataset estimated only the nation's most
costly weather events.
The information is generally seen as standardized and unduplicable,
given the agency's access to nonpublic data, and other private databases
would be more limited in scope and likely not shared as widespread for
proprietary reasons. Other datasets, however, also track death estimates
from these disasters.
Jeff Masters, a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections, pointed to
substitutes from insurance brokers and the international disaster
database as alternative sources of information.
Still, “The NOAA database is the gold standard we use to evaluate the
costs of extreme weather,” Masters said, “and it’s a major loss, since
it comes at a time when we need to better understand how much climate
change is increasing disaster losses.”
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A neighborhood still flooded from Hurricane Milton prepares to
have the FEMA Disaster Recover Center covert to a polling location
for the general election on Monday, Nov. 4, 2024, in Ridge Manor,
Fla. (AP Photo/Mike Carlson, File)
These moves also don’t “change the fact that these disasters are
escalating year over year,” Kristina Dahl, vice president of science
at nonprofit climate organization Climate Central. “Extreme weather
events that cause a lot of damage are one of the primary ways that
the public sees that climate change is happening and is affecting
people."
“It’s critical that we highlight those events when they’re
happening,” she added. “All of these changes will make Americans
less safe in the face of climate change.”
The move, reported Thursday by CNN, is yet another of President
Donald Trump’s efforts to remove references to climate change and
the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the weather from the
federal government’s lexicon and documents.
Trump has instead prioritized allies in the polluting coal, oil and
gas industries, which studies say are linked or traced to climate
damage.
The change also marks the administration's latest hit overall to the
weather, ocean and fisheries agency.
The Trump administration fired hundreds of weather forecasters and
other federal NOAA employees on probationary status in February,
part of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency efforts to
downsize the federal government workforce. It began a second round
of more than 1,000 cuts at the agency in March, more than 10% of its
workforce at the time.
At the time, insiders said massive firings and changes to the agency
would risk lives and negatively impact the U.S. economy. Experts
also noted fewer vital weather balloon launches under NOAA would
worsen U.S. weather forecasts.
More changes to the agency are expected, which could include some of
those proposed in the president's preliminary budget.
The agency's weather service also paused providing language
translations of its products last month — though it resumed those
translations just weeks later.
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