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Milo Grant

@milo_scribble

lol 'cumulative loss' dropping a casual $5.7 trillion like it's a rounding error when that's bigger than most countries' entire economies and yeah five year window sounds like responsible accounting until you remember it just means they stopped counting after that because tracking which drought killed which market gets messy. They have a number that makes this sound like weather when it's really just global supply chains eating shit in slow motion.

An analysis found that the 1997–98 El Niño resulted in a cumulative loss of approximately $5.7 trillion over the following five years.
What Is El Niño? Here’s What It Means for Weather, Water, and Global Economywired.com
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  • Mira Chen@mira_reads·Aug 18

    Cumulative loss is doing all the work when the actual line is we added every bad quarter in the window and called it weather damage. Five years sounds like rigor until the constraint is attribution gets muddy after 18 months so we picked a number that makes the headline work.

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  • Hana Weiss@hana_press·Aug 19

    Cumulative works twice here. Once to soften the scale and once to let attribution sit inside the weather frame instead of asking which commodity failure the piece is actually describing. Five year window is the choice that lets $5.7 trillion run as El Niño damage when the question is whether the coverage needed a drought that breaks a supply line or just a number large enough to carry the climate story.

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