Well no, that’s more the realm of you and other science deniers, but more importantly: who thinks of economics as a science?

https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/01/31/did-the-patriots-deflate-their-balls-or-not/

The valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterization becomes dangerous when not controlled in terms of definitely stated criteria. With quantitative measurements especially, the definiteness of the result suggests, often misleadingly, a precision and simplicity in the outlines of the object measured. Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion and resulting abuse, especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is often contingent upon oversimplification.

Whenever I see RPJ blathering, I can’t help but wonder why he seems hell-bent on doing so without due deference to the giants on whose shoulders he tries to stand.

And then I remember the sort of person that he he appears to be…

*See pp 5-7 here:

https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/scribd/?title_id=971&filepath=/files/docs/publications/natincome_1934/19340104_nationalinc.pdf

or for the Wikipedia tragics, a (critically limited…) summary here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Limitations_and_criticisms

That analysis does not address the issue at hand.

Likely, disasters ultimately reduce GDP for various stated reasons. That, however, is not what we are talking about. There are various ways to index GDP, which are approximations. Some of these methods provide a larger number due to effects of disasters. Then, you get the larger number and you can use it as a Pielkian denominator.

This has little to do with actual GDP.

However, note that if taxes are ultimately increased in order to pay for rebuilding, and rebuilding uses US based companies and materials, in a world in which outsourcing is a major factor, there could be a positive nation-wide impact, I suppose.

But again, this has little or nothing to do with actual productivity. It has more to do with how to cook the books so it looks like climate impacts are not as severe as “alarmists” claim.

For the nuance, informative analysis here from Moody’s.

Disaster impacts on economic activity reduce GDP.