What was done
Based on information on flood losses obtained from the Emergency Events Database and the Natural Hazards Assessment Network, the author developed a 1970-2006 history of normalized monetary flood losses in Europe -- including the member states of the European Union along with Norway, Switzerland, Croatia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia -- by calculating the value of losses that would have occurred if the floods of the past had taken place under the current socio-economic conditions of the continent, while further removing inter-country price differences by adjusting the losses for purchasing power parities.

What was learned
Barredo reports "there is no evidence of a clear positive trend in normalized flood losses in Europe," and that "changes in population, inflation and per capita real wealth are the main factors contributing to the increase of the original raw losses." Consequently, after removing the influence of the stated socio-economic factors, the European Commission researcher concludes that "there remains no evident signal suggesting any influence of anthropogenic climate change on the trend of flood losses in Europe during the assessed period."

What it means
In spite of climate-alarmist claims to the contrary, there appears to have been no increase in the magnitude of physical flood damage throughout all of Europe over the period of time the world's radical environmentalists contend was the warmest of the past thousand or more years. Clearly, their catastrophic contentions ring ever more hollow with each passing day, especially in a world that has experienced no net warming over the past decade or more.