Not quite so unprecedented a disaster

Julia Gillard explains why we should pay her $1.8 billion flood levy:

I think Australians around the country realise this is a time where we need to pull together. We are seeing a natural disaster of unprecedented economic proportions still unfolding in our country.

Again:

Now there is a difference with this event. There is a difference with the scale of it. There is a difference with the economic effect.

Again:

The great floods of this summer have destroyed billions of dollars of wealth and robbed us of billions of dollars of income.  In time they may prove to be the most expensive disaster in Australian history.

But wait.

Ryan Crompton is from Risk Frontiers, an independent research centre at Macquarie University devoted to the understanding and pricing of catastrophe risks for the insurance and emergency management sectors. He compares the insurance losses to date from these floods with those of previous years in Australia:

Not even close - yet.

Crompton's explanation, sent to Professor Roger Pielke Jr (who had an extensive post here on this):

The figure shows the Crompton and McAneney (2008) Figure 2(b) adjusted to include the seasons 2006/07 - 2009/10 and the loss from the recent Queensland floods (the only loss included in the current 2010/11 season). The losses in the four complete seasons added to the time series have been normalised to 2005/06 values as per Crompton and McAneney (2008) so that losses have been reduced from their original values for consistency with the other data. The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) has released updated figures (PDF) on the insurable losses in Queensland as a result of flooding, with the current estimate at $1.2 billion. With the final loss from this event not yet known and likely to increase, the original loss of $1.2 billion has been included in the above figure rather than the equivalent 2005/06 normalised value (which would be a bit lower).

(A summary of the Crompton and McAneney papers here.}

So what were the biggest insurance losses from natural disasters in our past? From Crompton and McAneney:

Compare this to the Insurance Council of Australia's preliminary report on insurance losses from the Queensland floods - which, note well, should go up as more claims are processed:

The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) today released updated figures on the insurable losses in Queensland as a result of flooding.

"The general insurance industry has now received 31,300 claims with an estimated insurable value of $1.2 billion," said Mr Rob Whelan, CEO of the ICA.

These figures include claims from regional QLD, Lockyer Valley, Toowoomba and Brisbane.





They do not include large industrial and mining claims.

(My bold,)

Some estimates say the insurable losses will be closer to $3 billion. This will also not include a lot of government-owned infrastructure.

Gillard may yet be right, but for now the media should be slower to repeat the claim, so useful for the Government, that the floods are already the worst natural disaster we've ever faced.

UPDATE

Two other Risk Frontiers researchers tackle another popular media meme - that the floods are not only unprecedented, but caused by global warming:

A study by MacQuarie University professors John McAneney and Kevin Rochie points to societal changes, increase in population, wealth and inflation as the reason the cost of destruction brought about the the flooding in Queensland rose and not climate change. Across different natural hazards and jurisdictions, some 22 separate peer-reviewed studies of weather-related natural disaster events now attest to this fact…

They note that the city of Brisbane, like many other towns in Queensland, is built on a floodplain.

They add:

Compared with the current disaster, there have been even bigger floods in the past: in 1841 and 1893 when flood waters topped 8.35 meters, some 3.9 m above the latest peak.

(Via Roger Pielke Jr. Thanks to reader Professor A.)