When Washington Stopped Counting, Climate Central Took Over
After the Trump administration ended the federal disaster-cost database, Climate Central revived it — because what you don’t measure, you can’t manage.
“What gets measured gets managed.” —Peter Drucker
The Data Gap That Wasn’t an Accident
When the Trump administration quietly stopped updating a federal database that tracked the cost of extreme weather, it didn’t just delete a spreadsheet — it erased a mirror.
That database, maintained since the 1990s by NOAA, catalogued every U.S. disaster that caused at least $1 billion in damage.
It was one of the few government tools that made the cost of weather disasters visible — year over year, region by region, dollar by dollar.
The reason for the shutdown was never technical.
It was political.
Because when you can measure something, you can manage it. But when you stop measuring, you can ignore it.
That logic echoes a famous “Trumpian” quote during the pandemic:
‘If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any’
The Data Lives On — Outside of Government
As the New York Times reports, the database has been resurrected by Climate Central, led by Adam Smith, the NOAA scientist who had managed the program for 15 years before leaving the agency in 2025. Using the same methodology, the nonprofit has released the first independent update — and the numbers are staggering:
More than $100 billion in disaster losses through the first half of 2025 — the costliest start to any year on record.
14 separate events already exceeding $1 billion each.
Wildfires in Los Angeles alone accounted for over half of all national losses, nearly doubling previous records for fire damage.
That’s not speculation — it’s accounting. And it’s accounting the government no longer wanted to publish.
Why the Numbers Matter
The “Billion-Dollar Disaster” database is more than a historical record. It’s the connective tissue between climate science, economics, and public policy — used by insurers, risk managers, and local governments to understand exposure, set premiums, and justify infrastructure investments.
Without it, we lose the ability to quantify — and therefore to manage — the accelerating cost of extreme weather.
As Andrew Rumbach of the Urban Institute told the Times:
“It’s one of the most effective bridges to the public — a powerful tool for showing that the cost of inaction is real.”
The Bigger Picture
The updated data also reveals a hard truth:
Even as forecasting and modeling improve, damage continues to rise — not only because weather extremes are intensifying, but because we keep building in harm’s way.
Population growth in floodplains, fire zones, and coastal regions amplifies the impact of every event.
As Adam Smith notes, the trendlines are clear: “The rise in damage relates to human activities.”
That’s not ideology; it’s physics, urban planning, and actuarial math.
The G2 Weather Intelligence View
For those of us who work in weather intelligence, this episode underscores a fundamental principle —
When organizations choose not to measure, they’re really choosing not to manage.
But nature doesn’t pause because the spreadsheet does. The storms, fires, and floods keep coming — and the costs compound, whether they’re counted or not.
So bravo to my friends at Climate Central for doing what good science always does: measuring what matters, even when it’s inconvenient.
Additional reading —
From the (always insightful) Balanced Weather substack:
Ending of NOAA billion dollar climate disaster tracking another example of us becoming less prepared for a future affected by climate change.