Trump Axed NOAA's Climate Disaster Data. This Group Brought It Back

Every natural disaster presents a bill when it’s done. Hurricane Katrina, which inundated the Gulf States in 2005, did $201.3 billion worth of damage. Superstorm Sandy, which hit the northeast in 2012, cost $71 billion. The drought and heat wave that seared 22 midwestern and western states in 2012 set the U.S. back $41.7 billion. Since 1980, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has maintained a database tracking these bank-busting events, logging every drought, flood, freeze, severe storm, tropical cyclone, wildfire, or winter storm that had a price tag of $1 billion or more. In that time it has tallied 403 such events, totaling more than $2.9 trillion and claiming nearly 17,000 lives. The billion-dollar database is more than just a catalogue of crises; in the past 45 years it has been an invaluable tool for climate scientists, lawmakers, and insurance groups to conduct research, draft public policy, and hedge financial bets.  But on May 7, 2025 it ended its run—a victim of sweeping White House cuts to government personnel, projects, and agencies. The existing database remains online, but there will be no fresh information collected for 2025 and beyond. The reason wasn’t given, but Rick Spinrad, the former head of NOAA, who was appointed during the Biden presidency and left the job when President Donald Trump took office—a routine move for political appointees during changes of administrations—has an educated guess. “The database had that brush of climate relevance and climate impact, and was tainted in the eyes of the administration,” he says. “Anything that’s hit by the climate tinge is being pulled. The result will be a lack of preparedness for future billion-dollar events.” That matters—a lot. In 2024, according to NOAA, the U.S. was hit by 27 billion-dollar disasters, following a record-setting 28 such events in 2023. The annual average for billion-dollar storms since 1980 is just nine. Nearly all climatologists blame the increase on climate change, which is fuelling bigger, more frequent storms.  Now, the nonprofit sector has stepped in. This morning, the environmental advocacy group Climate Central announced that it is reviving the billion-dollar database, taking it out of the hands of the government and relaunching it under the leadership of applied climatologist Adam Smith, who ran the project at NOAA and now does the same job for Climate Central as the group’s senior climate impact scientist. The product, Smith insists, will not be diminished. “We’re using the same public and private sector partners and gold standard datasets that we used at NOAA,” he says. “The demand for the revival of this dataset came from many aspects across society. This data set is simply too important to stop being updated.” In fact, the new product might even be better. Climate Central’s version of the database will be more granular than the government’s, tracking events that do as little as $100 million worth of damage and scrutinizing wildfires more closely, logging individual blazes as opposed to seasonal regional figures, as the government does. “We’re trying to continue developing some innovations that we’d started at NOAA but never saw them through,” says Smith. “We used AI to help accelerate some of the development and it’s certainly come together faster than we anticipated.” The new push is paying off with Climate Central gathering some scary numbers. In just the first six months of 2025, there have been 14 billion-dollar events, costing a total of $101.4 billion. The most expensive of the disasters were the L.A. wildfires, which carried a price tag of $60 billion. The past six months have been the costliest half-year on record. Not everyone believes the website should be revived—or even have existed in the first place—with criticism coming mostly from the Right. When the plug was pulled back in May, Congressman Brian Babin—a Texas Republican and chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee—issued a statement praising the move. “For months, the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee has scrutinized NOAA’s use of the Billion-Dollar Disasters dataset—a dataset increasingly relied upon by policymakers but riddled with scientific and methodological flaws. I applaud the Trump Administration for recognizing those flaws and taking decisive action. The American people deserve data they can trust, not political narratives dressed up as science.” Last year, Roger Pielke, Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and professor emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, published a paper in Nature making a case similar to Babin’s. Among other things, Pielke argued, “the database is insufficiently transparent and traceable, failing to provide a way for users to run down the sources of data used.” Pielke also believes that the NOAA scientists attribute the increase in billion-dollar events to climate change without sufficient evidence to back up that claim. “Public claims promoted by NOAA associated with the dataset and its significance are flawed and at times misleading,” Pilke wrote. His is a minority voice. The overwhelming share of scientists, agencies, and international groups—including NASA and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—agree that industrial-era greenhouse emissions are heating the planet, driving both costlier and more frequent storms.   While no single storm or event can be directly attributable to climate change, rising global temperatures produce conditions more favorable to disasters. Warmer air, for example, boosts evaporation, which leads to more moisture entrained in the atmosphere, intensifying rainfalls, while warmer oceans provide an energy source for more violent hurricanes. As Smith puts it: “The billion-dollar disaster dataset represents a long-term record of authoritative research on major disaster costs incorporating the most robust public and private sector data sources and analysis.” Even if Climate Central’s database is scientifically solid, it could eventually fail for a simple reason: money. The government’s pockets are a lot deeper than an NGO’s, and NOAA has dedicated no shortage of funds keeping its version of the site up and running.  “NOAA has spent millions and millions if not billions of dollars collecting the data and analyzing it,” Spinrad says. “It’s going to be a tall order for a non-governmental institution to make the same level of investment.” However long Climate Central is able to keep the database running, both professionals and the public will benefit from the information being out there and available. Billion-dollar events are not going anywhere; the first step for a smart public is to remain informed.