A new report released by CoreLogic, a financial and property analytics company, is claiming that a full one in 10 American residential properties was affected in some way by climate change in 2021. The report — the 2021 CoreLogic Climate Change Catastrophe Report — shows that at least 14.5 million American properties were affected by wildfires, hurricanes, severe weather, and winter storms last year.
“By leveraging granular data for the increasing frequency and severity of catastrophes, we are able to see that more than 14.5 million homes were impacted to some degree by natural hazards in 2021. That’s about 1 in every 10 homes in the United States,” said Tom Larsen, CoreLogic’s principal.
“Insurers and lenders can leverage the latest technologies and work cross-functionally to better understand this risk, protect homeowners and enable faster recovery times,” Larsen stressed.
Interestingly, according to CoreLogic, winter storms ravaged the most homes in 2021, which is odd because climate change used to be referred to as global warming, and an alleged warming of the Earth as a whole still underpins what climate hysterics now refer to as climate change. According to CoreLogic, 12,764,941 U.S. homes were impacted by winter storms in 2021, far outpacing the next highest impact event — hurricanes, with 1,233,860 homes impacted. Unspecified “severe weather” impacted 563,627 homes, while wildfires, even for all the media hysteria surrounding them, only impacted 4,101 homes, according to the report.
In fact, the winter weather which is supposedly caused by global warming is responsible for almost all of CoreLogic’s reconstruction cost value (RCV) metric, with winter storms being responsible for over $2.26 billion out of a $2.79 billion RCV total for all the disasters combined.
Overall, hurricanes were responsible for the most damage as a whole, with $33 billion in property damage. Winter weather — particularly the 2021 winter weather in Texas — caused $15 billion in total damage. The unnamed severe storms caused $7.46 billion in damage overall. Those pesky wildfires, despite their large media representation, were only responsible for $1.46 billion in overall damages.
CoreLogic then makes an astounding claim: “Natural disasters are increasing in frequency and severity, impacting regions underprepared to handle an economic disruption, job displacement and the destruction of real estate assets.”
Economic losses from natural disasters, which is the primary focus of the CoreLogic report, are down, according to a 2019 article from Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. “The data show that direct economic losses from weather and climate-related disasters have declined (based on a linear trend) over the past 30 years from slightly under 0.3% of global GDP to slightly under 0.2% of global GDP. Great news,” Pielke wrote.
Natural disasters may or may not be “increasing in frequency and severity,” as CoreLogic reports, but the natural disaster that causes the most overall damage according to their report — hurricanes — are not increasing in either frequency or strength according to a 2021 report done by scientists from Princeton, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Utah State, and the University of Iowa.
In fact, any perceived uptick in storms is probably due to our much greater ability to detect storms that, in the past, might have gone undetected.
“The homogenized basin-wide HU and MH (Major Hurricane) record does not show strong evidence of a century-scale increase in either MH frequency or MH/HU ratio associated with the century-scale, greenhouse-gas-induced warming of the planet,” that study states.
Studies such as the one by CoreLogic get released into the public without much interest in their accuracy because they fit the narrative that the mainstream media is attempting to push — namely that so-called climate change is happening right now and you must immediately panic about it. The truth — something that today’s media has little interest in — is quite different from that narrative.
