Insurers Want Businesses to Wake Up to Costs of Extreme Heat (bloomberg.com) 56
Swiss Re has identified extreme heat as a significant insurance threat in its latest annual report on emerging risks with the Zurich-based reinsurer noting that up to half a million people globally die from extreme heat effects each year. The death toll exceeds the combined impact of floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. Heat waves contributed to conditions that generated $78.5 billion in insured wildfire losses globally from 2015-2024, Swiss Re reported.
The Los Angeles wildfires this year could add up to $45 billion in insured losses, according to UCLA Anderson School of Business estimates. The insurance industry has historically underestimated heat-related costs because damages spread across multiple policy types rather than appearing as a single category. Construction firms face rising medical insurance and workers compensation claims when outdoor workers suffer heat injuries, plus potential liability for inadequate cooling breaks.
The Los Angeles wildfires this year could add up to $45 billion in insured losses, according to UCLA Anderson School of Business estimates. The insurance industry has historically underestimated heat-related costs because damages spread across multiple policy types rather than appearing as a single category. Construction firms face rising medical insurance and workers compensation claims when outdoor workers suffer heat injuries, plus potential liability for inadequate cooling breaks.
But more from cold. (Score:3, Interesting)
Half a million from heat... ">4.6 million from cold. Or is there some reason the insurance industry doesn't have to cover cold?
hot and cold running climate denial (Score:3)
There's more to consider: floods, hurricanes, and ice storms for instability of the polar vortex and the winding down of the Atlantic gyre.
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Maybe they already do what can be done (or what they want to pay for) against cold.
Re:But more from cold. (Score:5, Insightful)
>Half a million from heat... ">4.6 million from cold
Do you suppose these numbers might have some underlying context? Like... I dunno... the majority of the global population being in colder climates?
Regardless, if you read the report and not just the summary, the major concern is property; buildings, land, vehicles, crops and livestock, etc. You know, the things that actually cost insurance companies money. Dead people generally don't cost much, though sick people do and heat is more a problem than cold when it comes to health.
Make no mistake; This is an actuarial concern, not a humanitarian one.
=Smidge=
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>> Half a million from heat
It was "extreme heat", and considerable detail on how the effects are increasing.
>> 4.6 million from cold
Who told you that?
>> is there some reason the insurance industry doesn't have to cover cold?
Nope, I am pretty sure someone will sell you insurance for cold weather.
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I came up with this:
https://ourworldindata.org/par... [ourworldindata.org]
So, yeah... Cold kills more people by a statistically significant amount.
I live in a fairly cold area of the world. We have cold-related deaths every year. We also don't tend to get so hot as to kill anybody other than the infirm. At least not often. We have had larger heat waves but they're far from the temperatures you'd expect in the southern part of the US.
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Interesting website but the evidence is weak, and the definition is very broad.
'due to “moderate” rather than extremely cold conditions'
'an earlier death than would have occurred if the temperatures were “optimal”.'
'most temperature-related deaths reduced lifespans for at least one year'
Meanwhile the Swiss Re report states that "up to half a million people globally die from extreme heat effects each year".
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We have cold-related deaths every year. We also don't tend to get so hot as to kill anybody other than the infirm. At least not often.
Right.
The article is about the increasing cost to insurers from rising heat. Life and Health impacts are significant, but I think that's it's fairly obvious that the nature of those impacts will vary from region to region, with actual direct deaths not occurring in arctic areas. They're increasing in temperate areas though: France recorded over 5,000 deaths due to summer 2023 heat [lemonde.fr]. But for the insurance industry the impacts on the economy, agriculture and heat stress are important as well as actual deaths.
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Oh, I was just addressing their skepticism about cold weather being more deadly. I did not address anything but that.
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That site considers things like getting a cold in the winter to be a death from cold rather then direct affects. Here in western Canada, I'm 50 odd miles east of Vancouver, a couple of people freeze to death every winter. The other year we had a heat dome, temperature here hit 44C, 49.5C a hundred miles east, in a climate where being over 30C is rare. It was horrid, never experienced anything like it and hundreds of people dropped dead over a couple of days, 550 IIRC, directly from the heat, not getting a r
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Not to mention, in their example of the recent Los Angeles fires, they were caused by arson, not ambient temperature.
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While officials investigate possible causes, including arson, sparking power lines, and errant fireworks, an expert told NBC News that natural causes are more plausible than arson, due to heavy wind conditions. [bu.edu]
Climate change denial funded by the fossil fuel industry is increasingly influential in the media, weakened by competition from fake news and social media. If something sounds unlikely, and can be used to argue that clima
Re: But more from cold. (Score:2)
Cold doesn't burn down buildings, and unless they are in the path of a glacier... Ok, that's snarky, there's hail and snow and such. But go ahead and price insurance for those.
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People burn their house down trying to heat it. That's fairly common.
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In fact we had that here fairly recently, some older people who lost their home and had nowhere to go squatted in it and burned it down with a candle, with themselves inside of it.
Re: But more from cold. (Score:2)
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Its the rate of change you contrary fuck.
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Half a million from heat... ">4.6 million from cold. Or is there some reason the insurance industry doesn't have to cover cold?
Some of that is the influence of the fossil fuel industry on reporting of the impacts of climate change. For instance in Australia, [R]ecent research1 indicates that official records underestimate the association at least 50-fold. [thelancet.com]
pen 15 (Score:1)
That's funny, we've been saying the insurance industry could change the world if they bothered to notice this stuff a few decades ago for, well, decades
too late now dickfucks, it's all coming down
Why is global warming so expensive ? (Score:4, Insightful)
And if global warming is a huge conspiracy by climate scientists, how come few of them are as rich as oil executives?
I don't understand why there are consequences to everything we do, and why we have to adapt our behavior to avoid dire results when it is expensive and uncomfortable to make any changes.
Why can't green energy smell like fresh baked bread and take no additional effort to produce but also make everyone incredibly rich? These scientists and engineers have been playing us for fools when they could have made this whole thing as easy as ordering a bacon double cheese burger.
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The argument only makes sense if you completely discount externalities. Once you factor them in, the costs of fossil fuels are absolutely monumental.
I mean, a bullet to the head cures cancer, but I'm not exactly seeing this being proposed as a medical solution.
Re: Why is global warming so expensive ? (Score:1)
How come my Dad got a doctor to prescribe him a suicide pill for his cancer? Is it more common than talked about?
Externalities [Re:Why is global warming so exp...] (Score:2)
The argument only makes sense if you completely discount externalities. Once you factor them in, the costs of fossil fuels are absolutely monumental.
The reason we call them "externalities" is because they are external, something beyond our control.
No.
"Externality" in the economics sense means something that affect people other than the person making the action.
It has nothing to do with whether the effects are outside your control. If, for example, your gold refining plant produces cyanide as a waste product, and you dump that cyanide in the river, and it kills people, that would be an example of an externality that is completely in your control. It is external to you, so in economic terms, it is an externality.
They may even be beyond our ability to comprehend fully.
Externalities are externalities whethe
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An externality is an externality regardless of whether we can or can't quantify it in a meaningful way.
I'm not going to argue about the definition of an externality as it seems beyond definition any more. Using the term as defined in economics works, so I'll stick with that as best I can in the future.
To internalize these external costs there must be a means to quantify them or people will go around and around on any kind of law to internalize those costs by some kind of tax or fee paid to the government, and to pay out this collected money to those harmed to make things right.
If someone wants to call the e
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That's not why they are called extrernalities. They are called externalities because they are the external consequences of actions. They are very much in our control, and if you are going to price any commodity fairly, to make it reflect true market and societal costs, then you have to price those in. Otherwise what you're really doing is subsidizing an industry.
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The reason we call them "externalities" is because they are external, something beyond our control.
Nope, that's not what an externality is.
Externalities arise from production and consumption and lie outside of the market transaction. This short topic video looks at examples and explains the difference between private, external and social costs and benefits. [tutor2u.net]
I suspect that you know that.
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IInstead of a pleasant drive in a climate controlled car, they're selling
a pleasant drive in a climate controlled car [volvocars.com].
It appears to me that no matter who is correct on climate
Who's correct out of the people studying the science, and the people paying PR groups to convince the people that the science is wrong? How the fuck is that a question?
because the climate will change no matter what we do
If we stop increasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses, we will stop increasing the greenhouse effect. FFS. This isn't rocket science.
The climate changes as a matter of shifting solar output, changes to Earth's orbit, and more.
Right. Since the middle of last century it and changes to the Earth's orbit are the cause of the glaciation every 100,000 years or so. Which, ag
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a pleasant drive in a climate controlled car.
Did you link to Volvo for some reason I'm not picking up?
Who's correct out of the people studying the science, and the people paying PR groups to convince the people that the science is wrong? How the fuck is that a question?
Because it is not just PR people getting paid, they have their own scientists too.
If we stop increasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses, we will stop increasing the greenhouse effect. FFS. This isn't rocket science.
Oh, now I think I'm seeing where this is going. You are thinking I'm defending the fossil fuel companies because I'm pointing to how they have better PR people.
I'm not defending fossil fuels. I'm pointing to how the fossil fuel companies are selling what people want, while the alternatives look pretty bland in comparison. That means they make money while the alternati
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And if global warming is a huge conspiracy by climate scientists, how come few of them are as rich as oil executives?
If you could predict climate with any sort of accuracy and granularity you could become very, very rich. Hell, accurately predicting the start and end of a single drought could set you up for life.
But they can't, so they aren't.
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It's not hard to predict the trend, multiple research groups have been able to confidently point up for about 35 years.
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And if global warming is a huge conspiracy by climate scientists, how come few of them are as rich as oil executives?
If you could predict climate with any sort of accuracy and granularity you could become very, very rich.
If you are predicting with granularity, it's weather, not climate.
Weather is much harder to predict than climate, in the same way that it's much easier to predict the average height of male Americans born in the decade of the 1990s than it is to predict the height of John Schmoe born on June 12, 1994.
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If you could predict climate with any sort of accuracy and granularity you could become very, very rich.
Like scientist have been doing since for 40 years [carbonbrief.org], despite that they haven't become very, very rich?
Weather ends up averageing out (Score:3)
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They know good and well what they are insuring. That's why several major insurance companies have pulled out of Florida and premiums have skyrocketed all along the US gulf coast.
https://www.insurance.com/home... [insurance.com]
It's weird to watch how the military & economy (Score:3)
In completely unrelated news Ford has released the largest SUV they have ever built and are marketing it as such.
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Personally, I prefer to drive my MRAP [wikipedia.org] around the countryside. Guzzles gas, but it's a really smooth ride as I run over cars, structures, and small to medium animals.
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The new Cadillac Escalade (the EV version) is huge and weighs just a bit under 10,000 pounds.
Sure, it's an EV but there are other externalities to consider. Just because it's an EV doesn't mean that it shouldn't also be efficient in its use of energy.
Can't you just raise premiums? (Score:2)
If insurers want people to know about something that is making insuring more expensive, they already have a great way: increase premiums.
What's the difficulty here? (Bloomberg pages don't load without javascript, so I couldn't RTFA.)
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>> they already have a great way: increase premiums
Which they have already done. Any more suggestions?
https://www.fox13news.com/news... [fox13news.com]
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Sure, the state can, and generally does, offer insurance of last resort, but that's not inexpensive either. But then, the taxpayers are the ones footing the bill [cnn.com].
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Hence the report noting the increasing risks.
Insurers just want more $$ for insurance (Score:1)
It's curious that they are talking about all the risks of extreme heat when the general consensus is that cold kills vastly more people.
Nearly all scientific surveys show that anywhere from 7x-20x people die from COLD than from HEAT.
Lancet:
https://www.thelancet.com/jour... [thelancet.com]
Cold : Heat 15:1 in US; 20:1 averaged across 13 countries.
SBN
https://www.sustainabilitybynu... [sustainabi...umbers.com]
Cold:Heat 9:1
To be fair, NOAA's report had it at 1:4...but was based on MEDIA & WEB reports /nicescienceharharhar
https://journals.ametsoc.org [ametsoc.org]
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It's curious that they are talking about all the risks of extreme heat when the general consensus is that cold kills vastly more people.
They're a reinsurer. They will go bust if they don't correctly account for the increasing costs. The decreasing costs they can cope with.
Why do you suppose you bring up direct deaths by COLD? It wouldn't be ideological climate science denial, would it?
reply (Score:2)
That's horrible. We have a number of chimney fires every year, which can be pretty deadly. You also have people who try to heat their homes with a propane stove when the power goes out (which it does often). It's a damned shame but I don't have a solution to it outside of my local area.
We have no local fire department (unincorporated township) but the nearby village has a program where they come and clean chimneys for free (accepting a donation if you're able). I also cut more firewood than I need to. I sha