US will stop tracking the costs of extreme weather fueled by climate change

One limitation is that the dataset estimated only the nation’s most costly weather events.

The information is generally seen as standardized and unduplicable, given the agency’s access to nonpublic data, and other private databases would be more limited in scope and likely not shared as widespread for proprietary reasons. Other datasets, however, also track death estimates from these disasters.

Jeff Masters, a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections, pointed to substitutes from insurance brokers and the international disaster database as alternative sources of information.

Still, ‘‘The NOAA database is the gold standard we use to evaluate the costs of extreme weather,’’ Masters said, ‘‘and it’s a major loss, since it comes at a time when we need to better understand how much climate change is increasing disaster losses.’’

These moves also don’t ‘‘change the fact that these disasters are escalating year over year,’’ Kristina Dahl, vice president of science at nonprofit climate organization Climate Central. ‘‘Extreme weather events that cause a lot of damage are one of the primary ways that the public sees that climate change is happening and is affecting people.”

‘‘It’s critical that we highlight those events when they’re happening,’’ she added. ‘‘All of these changes will make Americans less safe in the face of climate change.’’