'Why Rising Disaster Costs Aren’t Proof of Climate Chaos'

"Following the news, one might get the impression that the increase in extreme weather events is an undeniable fact. The fact that the damage caused by natural disasters, measured in monetary terms, has increased significantly is often offered as proof of this. ...
    "However ... this is a little misleading. Of course, weather events such as hurricanes or floods caused by heavy precipitation are a major problem for a society experiencing them. However, it is misleading to attribute the associated material losses, which have increased over time, necessarily to climate change. 'There’s two separate issues in that. There’s the geophysical event, and then there’s the social impact ..., or the financial damage associated with these events, which increases over time. [This] is importantly linked to the state of the society as a whole ... how many houses are there ... or how many cars would be damaged by extreme weather conditions? What kind of property is there in those houses and cars that could potentially be destroyed? It is logical that if extreme weather destroys property in, say, the United States, the amount of property destroyed and hence the financial cost of the event would be significantly greater than in a poorer country. ...
    "If we ... take these things into account, can we say that extreme weather events have become more frequent, and more powerful and that the associated losses are increasing? 'If you adjust disaster losses or economic losses from these events for changes in inflation over time, changes in population and changes in wealth, the trend is minimised. There’s no trend afterwards,' [says Jessica Weinkle, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington]. In fact, she adds, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not detect increasing trends in the types of extreme weather events that are the leading causes of disaster losses. 
    "But at the same time, Weinkle argues, it doesn’t even matter if climate change is causing slightly more heatwaves in some regions and a bit more rainfall in others. She says that linking problems to climate change does not help to create any practical solutions needed to deal with extreme weather events. [When we have flooding, for instance, ... it can be very bad. Very big. But there are all sorts of reasons for them because of the policy choices that we’ve had in the past ... So climate change makes it perhaps a bit wettter here, perhaps a bit hotter there. But the floods would be an issue still. They're not necessarily more of an issue because of the overall warming.] What would probably help best are practical steps, and the wealthier the society is, the easier it would be to take them."

~ Hannes Sarv from his article 'Why Rising Disaster Costs Aren’t Proof of Climate Chaos'