About that Roger Pielke Jnr argument

I'm rather busy at the moment, but just wanted to note this passage from a recent Real Climate post, as it is a good, short summary of why one key Pielke Jnr argument is a complete distraction:

The cost of extreme weather events

If an increase in extreme weather events due to global warming is hard to prove by statistics amongst all the noise, how much harder is it to demonstrate an increase in damage cost due to global warming? Very much harder! A number of confounding socio-economic factors clouds this issue which are very hard to quantify and disentangle. Some factors act to increase the damage, like larger property values in harm’s way. Some act to decrease it, like more solid buildings (whether from better building codes or simply as a result of increased wealth) and better early warnings. Thus it is not surprising that the literature on this subject overall gives inconclusive results. Some studies find significant damage trends after adjusting for GDP, some don’t, tempting some pundits to play cite-what-I-like. The fact that the increase in damage cost is about as large as the increase in GDP (as recently argued at FiveThirtyEight) is certainly no strong evidence against an effect of global warming on damage cost. Like the stranger’s dozen rolls of dice in the pub, one simply cannot tell from these data.

The emphasis on questionable dollar-cost estimates distracts from the real issue of global warming’s impact on us. The European heat wave of 2003 may not have destroyed any buildings – but it is well documented that it caused about 70,000 fatalities. This is the type of event for which the probability has increased by a factor of five due to global warming – and is likely to rise to a factor twelve over the next thirty years. Poor countries, whose inhabitants hardly contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions, are struggling to recover from “natural” disasters, like Pakistan from the 2010 floods or the Philippines and Vietnam from tropical storm Haiyan last year. The families who lost their belongings and loved ones in such events hardly register in the global dollar-cost tally.