NPR.

This is the indicator from planet money.

I'm Daryan Woods.

And I'm Waylon Wong.

We have seen a lot of major natural disasters in the U.S. in the last couple of years. In 2024 alone,

there were hurricanes Milton and Helene, plus tornadoes in the central and southeastern parts of

the country. And these disasters we're talking about all shared something in common. They all hit

at least $1 billion in costs or damages. And we know this because the federal government tabulated the economic impact of these extreme

events.

So not quite a decade ago is an inflection point in terms of the frequency, the diversity,

and the magnitude and the cost of these extremes just went to another level and generally stayed at that level.

That's Adam Smith, not the economist, a climatologist.

It has got a checkson if he was.

Oh yeah, good catch, Darien.

This Adam Smith spearheaded something called the billion dollar weather and climate disasters database

at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

or NOAA.

NOAA is well known for its sophisticated weather forecasting, but it also calculated the cost

of climate disasters going back to 1980.

This was information that state and local governments used for budgeting and planning.

But NOAA will no longer be collecting this data.

Last month, the federal government said it was retiring the billion-dollar disaster database.

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