If you look a bit deeper at the statistics, this database "records disasters which have killed ten or more people; affected 100 or more people; resulted in a declared state of emergency, or a call for international assistance."
What factors besides frequency and severity of weather events could affect these statistics?
Most obvious are population growth (doubled over that period) and increased urbanization (reversed from 60:40 primarily rural, to 60:40 primarily urban). This means that an event with the same severity is greatly more likely to be reported and included in this database. Similarly for economic effects - because of the growth in assets, infrastructure, and GDP, that doubling of economic losses, even if in constant dollars, represents a decrease in losses relative to total assets. So this data doesn't really represent a measure of change in the weather as much as change in human society (and the page is titled, "The human cost...")
The IPCC report is somewhat equivocal about change in the actual heavy precipitation events, stating "the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation have likely increased...with increases in more regions than there are decreases". (with "likely" meaning > 2/3 probability)
If you look a bit deeper at the statistics, this database "records disasters which have killed ten or more people; affected 100 or more people; resulted in a declared state of emergency, or a call for international assistance."
What factors besides frequency and severity of weather events could affect these statistics?
Most obvious are population growth (doubled over that period) and increased urbanization (reversed from 60:40 primarily rural, to 60:40 primarily urban). This means that an event with the same severity is greatly more likely to be reported and included in this database. Similarly for economic effects - because of the growth in assets, infrastructure, and GDP, that doubling of economic losses, even if in constant dollars, represents a decrease in losses relative to total assets. So this data doesn't really represent a measure of change in the weather as much as change in human society (and the page is titled, "The human cost...")
The IPCC report is somewhat equivocal about change in the actual heavy precipitation events, stating "the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation have likely increased...with increases in more regions than there are decreases". (with "likely" meaning > 2/3 probability)
Roger Pielke, Jr., has done a lot of work on extreme weather events: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-to-understand-the-n...