Hurricane damage revised, upwards

Michael Mann is heavily promoting a new paper that applies a more sensible way to assess whether destruction from hurricanes in the US has been increasing.  His thread starts with this:

and goes on to explain the findings of a new paper, but I won't copy all of the tweets:

A summary of the paper itself is at phys.org:

Aslak Grinsted has calculated the historical figures in a new way. Instead of comparing single hurricanes and the damage they would cause today, he and his colleagues have assessed how big an area could be viewed as an "area of total destruction," meaning how large an area a storm would have to destroy completely in order to account for the financial loss. Simultaneously, this makes comparison between rural areas and more densely populated areas like cities easier, as the unit of calculation is now the same: the size of the "area of total destruction."

In previous studies, it proved difficult to isolate the climate signal. The climate signal should be understood as the effect climate change has on hurricane size, strength and destructive force. It was hidden behind variations due to the uneven concentration of wealth, and it was statistically uncertain whether there was any tendency in the destruction. But with the new method, this doubt has been cleared. The weather has, indeed, become more dangerous on the south and east coasts of the U.S. Furthermore, the result obtained by the research team is more congruent with the climate models used to predict and understand the development in extreme weather. It fits with the physics, quite simply, that global warming has the effect that there is an increase in the force released in the most extreme hurricanes.

 Roger Pielke Jnr is a famously obnoxious commentator on climate change, a trait he seemed to have picked up from his father.  (Both become nasty towards people who don't see things exactly the way they say things should be seen.)

I therefore predict that Pielke Jnr will be furious with this new analysis and will get into a flame war with those supporting it.