On Tuesday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will release with great fanfare the year-end update of its “billion dollar disaster” tally. If past is prologue, NOAA will vigorously promote the dataset in collaboration with environmental NGOs, reporters on the climate beat will uncritically parrot and amplify NOAA’s claims, and before long, the dataset will find itself cited in the peer-reviewed literature, identified by the U.S. government as a key indicator of human-caused climate change, and perhaps even cited by the U.S. president in support of the claim that all U.S. disaster costs are attributable to climate change.

What you will not see is any scientific critique, evaluation or independent peer review of the dataset.1

That is, until now.

Today, I am very happy to share with you a new preprint of a paper that I have just submitted to the new Nature journal, npj Natural Hazards. My paper, which was invited by the journal’s editors, is titled, Scientific Integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters.”