2023’s climate: It was a meh year for the U.S.

Weather disasters are the journalistic equivalent of potato chips. Betcha can’t eat one.

Extreme weather has it all for the news business. Great images, heart-wrenching human stories, lots of blame to spread. And for climate evangelists, it’s self-evident evidence, meaning evidence to oneself.

But for those who value data over image or ideology, 2023 doesn’t cut it. While every tornado, hurricane, drought, flood, or wildfire gets attributed to our warming climate, gimlet eyed climate watcher Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado points out that 2023 wasn’t evidence for any kind of trend other than normality. This, of course, wins him scorn and heaps of abuse from those who have a personal or political interest in assurances that the sky is falling as we fiddle.

In his newsletter, The Honest Broker, Pielke Jr. (the “junior” appendage is important, as his father is a distinguished climatologist at Colorado) writes, “The weather — and certainly the impacts — of the past 12 months in the United States was actually pretty typical, even benign, in historical context.”

Temperatures, summer and winter, were higher in 2023, he acknowledges, particularly in the winter. But the impacts weren’t unusual. Using dollar values of extreme weather (not necessarily a valid metric, but one favored by climate catastrophists), “This year will come in well below average for the total and insured economic costs of disasters in the United States, mainly because the only landfalling hurricane (Idalia) resulted in less than $1 billion in total damages, far less than the $22+ billion of an average hurricane season.”

Pielke offers a chart from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, to illustrate the U.S. temperature fluctuations in 2023.

He observes, “Month-by-month, 2023 ventured above and below the zero-line of the NOAA temperature anomaly time series. You can see from the figure above that there is no trend in this time series since December 2000, which is counter to what has occurred globally.”

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