Wildfires in Los Angeles are still sluggish as President Donald Trump begins to reverse Biden-era orders to deal with the climate crisis.

The climate-change-driven fire weather conditions in January helped fuel the refueling and the Eaton wildfire, which allowed nearly 40,000 acres to destroy Los Angeles, and by March, Los Angeles, Adam Smith, Adam Smith, when the leading researchers of the multi-billion-dollar weather and climate disaster program were still driving the range of ranges across the country and atmospheric ranges. Communication about his work.

Each month, Smith’s team updates an extensive online database that tracks losses from more than 400 natural disasters, dating back to 1980, with each loss causing more than $1 billion in losses. Following the Los Angeles wildfire, Smith said the warnings restricted his release on the database and sharing preliminary findings with the public: The fire caused at least $50 billion in damages, a figure that will continue to increase.

Smith resigned in early May over fears that the agency plans to retire a billion-dollar weather and climate disaster online database, and Smith developed a product over his 15-year career at NOAA. About a week later, NOAA announced that it would do this. The agency said it will no longer update the product, instead it will not list the official price tag of LA Wildfires and eliminate valuable databases often used by scientists, citizens and insurers who assess climate risks.

A NOAA spokesman said the database will no longer be updated “with evolving priorities and personnel changes.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Smith said the loss of the database is particularly important as billions of dollars in disasters such as major hurricanes and widespread wildfires become more frequent. In 2023, the United States broke most of the record for billion-dollar disasters with $28 billion in a year, according to the now-ruling database. Over the past five years, the United States has recorded about $24 billion in disasters each year - by comparison, the average of $300 million in disasters in the 1980s.

"We have to be more prepared now than ever," Smith said in an interview with NBC News. "Part of that is having the data and information and a better understanding of the possibilities. Unfortunately, with products like this and many others being discontinued...it creates a vacuum in knowledge."

The researchers say that rising global temperatures have been the long-term driver of drought and the increased risk of wildfires across the western United States over the past few decades. Across the U.S. cities, the warmer atmosphere is attracting more moisture and causing wetter, more powerful storms and hurricanes.

Rising extreme weather poses serious risks to the insurance industry and policyholders living in places that are prone to natural disasters. Extreme weather with heightened climate change has exacerbated the skyrocketing hurricanes in Louisiana and Florida, and homeowners may pay nearly $10,000 in annual premiums. California is experiencing a major insurance crisis as big-name insurers like State Farm exit insurance policies due to increased fire risk.

Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research predict that the increasing risk of disasters will increase annual premiums for climate-variable households by $700 over the next 30 years. Globally, a report by German insurer Munich found that in 2024, natural disasters caused a record $140 billion in insurance losses.

“There is no way to mask the cost of climate change that people who have already paid through their insurance premiums,” said Carly Fabian, a public citizen advocate for the nonprofit consumer rights group. “The insurance and reinsurance industries are designed to withstand a limited number of billions of dollars in disasters. They are not designed to withstand back-to-back disasters at this level of frequency.”

Data stored in the multi-billion dollar disaster database illustrates the monetary costs of hurricanes, severe storms and wildfires nationwide, which are key opinions on private insurers to model climate risks and set tax rates for homeowners living in vulnerable communities. She said that while insurers used various datasets for their proprietary climate risk models, the size of the NOAA billion-dollar disaster database cannot be replicated by private entities.

Jeremy Porter, a climate risk expert at the First Street Foundation, modeling climate risks for insurers, companies and government agencies, said the database is one of the most effective tools to illustrate the impact of climate-driven disasters on the U.S. economy. Porter said First Street uses a billion-dollar disaster database for national risk assessment reports.

The NOAA database is also an important tool for homeowners facing rate hiking, non-renewal and canceling their home insurance policies.

“We are dealing with a situation where there is a true information asymmetry in the industry where insurance companies can access private data and actual consumers cannot access that data,” said Alex Martin, director of policy for financial reform at the U.S., who is the policy director for nonprofits, who pushes strict corporate regulations. “Release from public data sources will exacerbate this asymmetry, making it harder for people across the country to understand its risks to understand why they are treated by financial service providers.”

Madison Condon, a professor of environmental law at Boston University, said the cuts to the NOAA $ billion disaster database are the latest in a series of data product rollbacks that insurers rely on, including a national climate assessment, an annual report on the impacts of climate change in the United States in late April, in which Trump dismissed all reports.

The Trump administration also retired data products that melt glaciers and sea ice cover in Antarctica, a series of blows to American Antarctic research. According to a leaked memo obtained by ProPublica, Trump plans to cut NOAA funds by 27%, focusing on cutting projects related to climate change - the deepest cuts (nearly 75%) are planned to go to the Office of Ocean and Atmospheric Research, which provides the Office of Ocean and Atmospheric Research that produces and maintains global climate models and often uses insurers to assess climate risks.