From NOAA to 2024, and guesstimate for January 2025:
Notes: Month-by-month accumulation of estimated costs of each year’s billion-dollar disasters, with colored lines showing 2024 (red) and the other top-10 costliest years; figures are in 2024$. Other years are light gray. 2024 finished the year in fourth place for annual costs. Screenshot from the NOAA NCEI Billion-dollar Disasters. Purple diamond is estimate for LA fires, by author. Source: NOAA accessed 1/12/2025. January 2025 ytd based on estimates $135 to $150 bn current dollars (AP 1/11/2025).
Addendum: Count data (same source):
Antoni will claim this is a sign that FEMA funds are way too high.
Off topic – preserving democracy, or not:
We receive assurances from “moderates” that Donald Trump does not represent a special threat to democracy, that our system has withstood anti-democratic efforts in the past, and will do so again. Nothing to see here, move along. Go back to ESPN. Go back to sleep.
To which I say, first they came for the whistle blowers, but I am not a whistle blower, so I did nothing. Then, they came for the election workers…immigrants…teachers…
Think I’m just a hand-wringing leftie? Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Joe Wright are the authors of “The Origins of Elected Strongmen”, a new book which looks at recent deterioration of support for democracy. Here’s the blurb:
“Since the end of World War II, democracies typically fell apart by coup d’état or through force. Today, however, they are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. To better understand these developments, this book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader’s career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform. Using original data capturing levels of personalism in the parties of democratically elected leaders from 1991 to 2020, The Origins of Elected Strongmen shows that the rise of personalist parties around the globe is facilitating the decline of democracy.
“Personalist parties lack both the incentive and capacity to push back against a leader’s efforts to expand executive power. As such, leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely to succeed in their efforts to dismantle institutional constraints on their rule. Such attacks on state institutions, in turn, reverberate throughout society, deepening political polarization and weakening supporters’ commitment to democratic norms of behaviour. In these ways, ruling party personalism erodes horizontal and vertical constraints on a leader, ultimately degrading democracy and raising the risk of democratic failure.”
The authors have an article at Politico, for those interested in a shorter take:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/12/republicans-save-democracy-trump-00197613
I remember being in Lompoc, CA in 1968 for a month of military training. Since there wasn’t enough temporary housing on base, I rented a small apartment nearby. One morning, I got up and the hill near the apartment complex was burning. No one seemed concerned. I questioned one of other tenents about why nothing was being done and the response was essentially that this happened every year and don’t worry about it. In the 50-60 years intervening, the population has spread to areas where these fires were “no big deal”… not just near LA, but in many areas along the coast of California. Policies that allowed controlled burns or forest thinning were abandoned in the “let nature take its course” philosophy. And then the population spread out to vulnerable areas.
https://www.newsweek.com/controlled-burns-california-forest-management-los-angeles-fires-2012492
So, now nature is taking its course through stick frame homes and everyone seems so surprised. Sure, it’s dry in California, but not nearly as dry as it has been in the past. So the climate change nonsense has no bearing on the current situation. It’s all about people, policies, and poor decisions. But, hey, now it’s a great opportunity for the YIMBY advocates to walk the talk after they bulldoze the remnants of homes and businesses.
Now let’s talk about building homes on unstable ground in hurricane prone areas….
We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
Benjamin Franklin
“Not neary as dry as it has been in the past” is all there is to climate change in your formulation. That’s just silly. Winds in the 85 to 100 mph range are a big part of what has driven these fires. A hotter climate means more extreme weather events, an these winds are extreme. A thirty year drought has changed conditions more than this year’s rains can remedy. Climate change is having profound effects that go well beyond your fond memories of youth.
Maybe you just can’t help yourself, but you should try – basing your thinking on your biases, instead of on facts, means you aren’t really thinking.
Gee Brucie boy – you have the lead for 2025 troll of the year. Keep up that hard work!!!
I love how Brucie quoted Ben Franklin. Yea – Bruce works extremely hard at remaining stupid!!!
‘Bout time you showed up. Where you been?
A lot of us have been hounded by 403 errors whenever we tried to post.