Guess what: Sometimes it gets hot in the summer, even in Europe. It's been hot before and will be again, and we might remind ourselves that only a few thousand years ago, much of northern Europe (and North America) was covered in mile-thick ice sheets. The climate has always changed. It always will. And weather - not the same thing as climate - will always cause some damage, when Mother Nature loads up with a rock in her fist and really lets us have a good one.
Now, European climate scolds are yapping like agitated Yorkshire Terriers about the increase in property damage caused by extreme weather events, which they claim are due to climate change. Here's their problem: If you know how to normalize data, their claims fall apart. In this case, they are looking at raw numbers, property damage caused year by year, but they aren't accounting for the population growth, in structures, and in property value over time. If you look at weather-caused damage as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), the claims fall apart.
Most of us are familiar with the old caution about lies, damn lies, and statistics. It's too often used to cast aspersions on statistical analysis in general, but that's a reach too far; statistical analysis can be a very effective way of analyzing data if you're careful and do it properly. In this case, by normalizing the data to show heavy weather damage, not as a gross number, but as a percentage of GDP, in other words, comparing economic damage as a percentage of the total economic activity of the area in question. That's comparing apples to apples, whereas the climate scolds are too often comparing apples to overweight Slovenian traffic cops.
Watt's Up With That's Anthony Watts brings us the result of an analysis done by the esteemed Roger Pielke Jr., who has done just this analysis, and guess what - it results in a flatline.
European Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra recently declared, “The reality is that as climate change continues, the pattern of more heat waves, more droughts, more heavy weather, and of course also more floods is going up… you will see more damage… the ever-larger economic damage that climate change… is bringing to our societies.”
It certainly sounds convincing. Unfortunately for that narrative, Roger Pielke Jr. has once again done what too few economists bother to do: examine the data before accepting the conclusion. Pielke’s latest analysis, based on newly updated catastrophe loss data from the European Environment Agency (EEA), finds that once economic growth is properly accounted for, Europe’s weather-related disaster losses have remained essentially flat since 1990.
Here are the two comparisons in graph form, from the article linked above:
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) July 5, 2026
Mr. Watts continues:
The updated EEA data covering 1990 through 2024 show year-to-year variability, as one would expect from weather, but essentially no long-term increase in normalized losses. Pielke summarizes the finding succinctly: “Once you account for economic growth, the normalized cost of weather and climate extremes in Europe has not increased over 1990–2024. The overall trend is flat.”
That conclusion is particularly noteworthy because the updated dataset includes the catastrophic floods that struck Germany and Belgium in 2021, events that generated some of the largest insured and uninsured losses in recent European history. Yet even after including those disasters, the long-term normalized trend remains essentially unchanged. In fact, once exposure is held constant, years such as 1990, 1999, and 2002 emerge as equally, or even more economically significant than some of the recent headline events.
That's how you crunch data, folks.
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Of course, there's an obvious solution to Europe's current hot weather problem: They could just join the modern world and embrace the wonders of air conditioning, like most civilized places have already done.
The current heat wave in Europe is front page news. Climate change is responsible, it is said. But what about most of the rest of the world that is experiencing normal summers? Extremes always occur somewhere.
But more to the point, what is the role of climate alarmism/activism in human discomfort and even death from heat waves? A recent AP story–“Europe’s Extreme Heat Would Be Impossible Without Climate Change, Scientists Say“–begs this question. Where is the study/story “Europe’s Heat Crisis Exacerbated by Climate Policy”? The paucity of air conditioning (etc.) from high electricity prices and even government mandates is the major problem, it turns out.
Amid heat misery, the rush to purchase small A/C units is on. But some political jurisdictions steeled on climate concern do not allow such acts of self-preservation. Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire (Parti Socialiste) wants only public cooling for the most vulnerable, not “the scourge” of home A/C. “To adapt together,” he said, “we need to change our way of life.”
Air conditioning is wonderful. Here in the wonderful United States, we started using it as early as the 1930s in commercial establishments, and by the time I was a young man in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was becoming very common in private homes; now it's almost universal. Not here in Alaska, maybe, but why would you need it when it rarely gets above 75 degrees? The point is, there's a great, existing technological solution.
Remember, though, the climate scolds, and the left in general, aren't really big on technological solutions. All of their proposed policies to address this issue-that-isn't involve moving backward, not forward, where our high-tech lifestyles are concerned.
So, we keep hammering them with facts. With data. With hard numbers that they can't just dismiss. Facts are stubborn things, after all. And if you want more of these kinds of facts, check out Roger Pielke Jr.'s Substack here. It's worth a visit.
