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Eric Neumayer and Fabian Barthel of the London School of Economics found likewise in their recent “global analysis” of natural disasters.

in his book The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming, Pielke writes that there’s no upward trend in the landfalls of tropical cyclones. Even floods in Brisbane aren’t getting worse – just check out the city’s 19th-century floods. Pielke says the consensus of peer-reviewed research on this point – that climate change is not yet worsening disasters – is as strong as any consensus in climate science.

It’s true that floods and hurricanes do more damage every decade. However, that’s because ever more people, owning ever more “stuff”, live in vulnerable spots.

When it comes to preventing today’s disasters, the squabble about climate change is just a distraction. The media usually has room for only one environmental argument: is climate change happening? This pits virtually all climate scientists against a band of self-taught freelance sceptics, many of whom think the “global warming hoax” is a ruse got up by 1960s radicals as a trick to bring in socialism. (I know, I get the sceptics’ e-mails.) Sometimes in this squabble, climate scientists are tempted to overstate their case, and to say that the latest disaster proves that the climate is changing. This is bad science. It also gives the sceptics something dubious to attack. Better to ignore the sceptics, and have more useful debates about disasters and climate change – which, for now, are two separate problems.