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The Los Angeles wildfires were still smoldering when President Donald Trump began overturning Biden-era orders to tackle the climate crisis.
Climate change-driven January fire weather conditions helped fuel wildfires in Pallisard and Eton, lead researchers in the billion-dollar climate disaster program, destroying 40,000 acres of land by March, destroying thousands of homes in LA, and being given the border of Adam Smith and the National Marine and Atmospheric Air, when he was given the wild presence of LA, ignoring the costs of cleaning up, and ignoring the costs of cleaning up, he had not left. Communication about his work.
Each month, Smith’s team updated a vast online database that tracks the losses of over 400 natural disasters dating back to 1980, each causing more than $1 billion in damages. In the aftermath of the LA wildfire, Smith says the warnings have restricted him from publishing it in the database and sharing preliminary findings with the public. The fire caused at least $50 billion in damages.
In early May, Smith resigned from concern that the agency had planned to abolish its $1 billion weather and climate disaster online database. Almost a week later, NOAA announced that it would do just that. The agency said it would not update the products, keep the official LA Wildfires prices private and eliminate valuable data banks that are regularly used by scientists, citizens and insurance companies assessing climate risk.
A NOAA spokesperson said the database will no longer be updated “in line with evolving priorities and staffing changes.” The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Smith said database losses are particularly important as billions of dollar disasters, such as major hurricanes and widespread wildfires, are becoming more frequent. In 2023, the US broke most $1 billion disaster records in a year with a $28 billion event, according to the currently portrayed database. Over the past five years, the US has recorded approximately $24 billion in disasters per year, compared to a disaster average of just $3 billion in the 1980s.
“We have to be more prepared than ever,” Smith said in an interview with NBC News. “And some of them have the data and information and better understand that they can and are capable of. Unfortunately, with such products and many other products being discontinued, it creates a kind of knowledgeable blank.”
Researchers say over the past decades, rising global temperatures have been a long-term driving force behind drought, increasing the risk of wildfires in the western United States. In cities across the US, warming atmospheres trap more moisture, creating stronger, more powerful storms and hurricanes.
Extreme weather rise poses serious risks to policyholders living in areas vulnerable to natural disasters. Extreme weather, exacerbated by climate change, has skyrocketed as homeowners could pay nearly $10,000 at an annual premium in hurricane-prone states like Louisiana and Florida. California is experiencing a major insurance crisis as well as well-known insurance companies like state farms have withdrawn their policies due to increased fire risk.
Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research predicted that an increased risk of disasters would increase annual premiums for households with climate disability by $700 over the next 30 years. Globally, a report from German insurer Munich Company Re found that in 2024, natural disasters caused a record loss that recorded $140 billion in insurance losses worldwide.
“There is no way to hide the costs of climate change from people who have already paid the costs of climate change through insurance premiums,” said Carly Fabian, a civics policy advocate, a nonprofit consumer rights group. “The insurance and reinsurance industries are designed to withstand a limited number of large multi-billion dollar disasters. They are not designed to withstand consecutive disasters at this level of frequency.”
Data stored in a multibillion-dollar disaster database shows the financial costs of hurricanes, severe storms and wildfires across the country, but is an important input for private insurers who model climate risks and setting rates for homeowners living in vulnerable communities. Although insurers use a variety of datasets for their own climate risk models, the size of NOAA’s $1 billion disaster database cannot be replicated by private companies, she said.
Jeremy Porter, a climate risk expert at the First Street Foundation, which models climate risk for insurance companies, businesses and government agencies, said the database is one of the most effective tools to explain the impact of climate-driven disasters on the US economy. Porter said First Street is using a $1 billion disaster database for its national risk assessment report.
The NOAA database is also an important tool for homeowners facing rate hikes, non-renewals, and cancellation of home insurance.
“We are dealing with situations in an industry where insurers have a lot of access to privatized data and where real consumers can’t access that data either,” said Americans for Financial Reform, policy director for a nonprofit that promotes stricter regulations for businesses. “Removing public data sources exacerbates that asymmetry and makes it more difficult for people across the country to understand their risks. Understand why they are dealing with what they are by financial service providers.”
Madison Condon, a professor of environmental law at Boston University, said NOAA’s $1 billion disaster database cuts are the latest in a series of rollbacks of data products that rely on national climate assessments, including the annual report on the impacts of US climate change in late April.
The Trump administration has also eliminated data products that documented melted glaciers and sea ice cover in Antarctica. This is the latest in a series of blows to research in the United States Antarctic. According to a leak memo obtained by Propublica, Trump plans to cut NOAA funds by 27%, focusing on climate change-related slash projects. It plans to produce and maintain the global climate model that insurers will use to assess Crim risk, with the deepest reduction, at almost 75%.
This story first appeared on nbcnews.com. More from NBC News:
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