How much damage did the L.A. wildfires cause? After Trump admin cuts, a crucial estimate is missing

Los Angeles forest fires were still leaning when President Donald Trump began reverse Biden era directives to federal agencies to address the climate crisis.
January, air conditions, fire By changing climate It helped fuel a sharp occurrence and Etone, which was demolished Almost 40,000 acres Of the lands and the destruction of tens of thousands of homes throughout Los Angeles by March, Adam Smith, who was then the main researcher of the weather and climate program with billions of dollars in the framework of the National Administration of Oceans and Air Country, still reveals the overwhelming costs of wild rumor when he obtained informal oral instructions to calm all contacts on his work.
Every month, the Smith team has updated a broad database via the Internet that followed losses of more than 400 natural disasters dating back to 1980, each caused damage to more than one billion dollars. In the aftermath of forest fires, Smith says that the warning is limited to publishing on the database and sharing the initial results with the audience: the fires caused at least $ 50 billion of damage, a number that would continue to rise.
In early May, Smith resigned from his position due to fears that the agency planned to retire Online online database of one billion dollars and climate disaster databaseSmith product has been developed for 15 years with NOAA. Nearly a week, NOAA announced that it would do so exactly. The agency stated that it would achieve The update is no longer The product, leaving the official price of the non -listed La Wildfires, and the elimination of a valuable data bank regularly used by scientists, citizens and insurance companies that evaluate climate risk.
A NOAA spokesman said that the database will not be updated “in line with advanced priorities and employment changes.” The White House did not respond to suspension requests.
Smith said that the loss of the database is especially important as the billion dollars of disasters such as major hurricanes and large -scale forest fires become more frequent. In 2023, the United States broke the record of most billion dollars in disasters in one year with $ 28 billion, according to the database now obtained. Over the past five years, the United States has registered about 24 billion disasters annually-compared to only three billion of disasters on average in the year in the eighties.
“We must be more prepared now than ever,” Smith said in an interview with NBC News. “And part of that is the presence of data, information and better understanding of what is possible. Unfortunately, with stopping products like this and other others … creates a kind of emptiness in knowledge.”
The researchers say that over the past few decades, the high global temperatures have been the driving force behind it Prolonged dehydration and Increase the risk of wild fires Through the western United States. In cities throughout the United States, warming may be besieged to besiege more moisture and creates More moisture, stronger Storms and hurricanes.
The height of the harsh weather is a dangerous risk of the insurance industry and the carriers of documents who live in places vulnerable to natural disasters. The harsh weather is exacerbated by climate change High rates In the watched states of a hurricane such as Louisiana and Florida, where the owner of the house may pay nearly $ 10,000 in annual installments. California is witnessing a major insurance crisis, as large insurance companies such as State Farm Withdrawing insurance policies Because of the high risk of fire.
Researchers from the National Office for Economic Research expected that disaster risk will increase Increase the annual installments of climatic living families With $ 700 over the next thirty years. Universally, a German report Insurance Company Munich I found that in 2024, natural disasters caused 140 billion dollars in insured losses around the world.
“There is no way to hide the costs of climate change from people who are already paid in exchange for this through their insurance premiums,” said Carly Fabian, who is an advocate of politics with the public citizen, a non -profit group for consumer rights. “The insurance and reinsurance industries are designed to withstand a limited number of major dollars in the value of largely. They are not designed to withstand successive disasters with this level of frequency.”
The data stored in the database of a billion dollars, which shows the cash cost of hurricanes, severe storms and forest fires across the country, are major inputs of private insurance companies that designer climate risk and determine their prices for home owners who live in weak societies. She said that insurance companies use a variety of data collections for their climate risk models, the size of the DAA database in NOAA billion dollars cannot be repeated by private entities.
Jeremy Porter, a climate expert at the FIRST Street Foundation, a climate risk company for insurance companies, companies and government agencies, said the database was one of the most effective tools to clarify the impact of climate -based disasters on the American economy. Porter said that Virrest Street uses a billion dollar disaster database for national risk assessment reports.
The Noaa database is also an important tool for home owners who face high prices and non -renewable prices and cancellation of home insurance policies.
“We are dealing with a situation in the industry where there is a real lack of information, as insurance companies have a lot of access to the privatized data and actual consumers can also access these data,” said Alex Martin, American policy manager for financial reform, a non -profit group that presses the amazing regulations of companies. “Getting rid of public sources of data will exacerbate the asymmetry and make it very difficult for people all over the country to understand their risks – to understand the reason for their dealings with what they are by financial service providers.”
Madison Condon, Professor of Environmental Law at the University of Boston, said that the discounts in the NOAA DAA database are the latest in a series of declines on the data products on which insurance companies depend, including the national climate evaluation, which is an annual report on the impact of climate change in the United States in late April, Trump, Trump to reject All scholars who work on the report from their posts.
Trump administration also Data products that have been suspended Documenting the melting of the ice escapes and the sea ice cover in the Antarctic, which is the latest in a series of strikes for us Antarctica Research. According to a leakage memo It was obtained by propublicaTrump plans to reduce NOAA financing by 27 %, with a focus on lowering climate change projects – with deepest discounts, approximately 75 %, planned for the peripheral research office and air cover, which produces and maintains global climate models routinely by insurance companies to assess climate risk.