22 Comments

If this has been covered elsewhere here, my apologies. Has Roger or anyone seen/analyzed this piece at the WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/pakistan-extreme-heat-health-impacts-death/ ? My guess is that there are places that will be more adversely affected than others by even modest changes in climate, while there are also places that may well benefit [a favorite topic of David Friedman]. The health risk, if real, strikes me as an important one, and also one that might be easier to disentangle from some of the partisan polarity. I'm not Team Fauci on this one; I am just curious.

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Thanks for this, helpful.

As noted, statistics can be made to show anything you want.

And.

Learned a new word.

"missingness"

That was in an actual technical paper? How about "incomplete".

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In a subsequent article that I read on this site, a NOAA scientist acknowledged the link between Right whales deaths and wind turbine construction on the US east coast while media, for instance, was quick to dismiss any link. It appears that the NOAA may have some objectivity.

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I think it only occurs accidentally. Should check and see if that scientist is still employed, or if still employed is he still singing the same song?

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Objectivity vs “the lived experience” war has been forced into $cience. It’s much more profitable skew data and catastrophize catastrophes

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Slight disagreement re clean bill of health for Munich and Swiss Re.

Following California Camp wildfire disaster, PG&E was found guilty, having caused the fire and payed out 11 billion to insurance and re-insurance cos for subrogated policies they settled with insured, hence limited, if any, real damage left with insurance cos.

I could not find any respective investor info from these companies about such good news. On the other hand they kept on lamenting about the climate, inferring causality for the fires, and of course preparing all and sundry for increases in premiums (Respective correspondence on file with both cos).

https://www.artemis.bm/news/pge-pays-11bn-subrogation-settlement-joins-wildfire-fund/

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There is a difference between what PR and C-Suite says and what the data say, this is true.

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If I remember corectly, Munich RE did a very poor job at first, reporting massive increases in insurance payouts after disasters. This was around Katrina, 2005ish? Then you called them out on not using normalized losses. And they responded by eventually let you work with their data.

Is that somewhat correct? I remember it as you making a profound difference in this area.

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Yes, you are referring to the Hohenkammer workshop and the associated papers that followed. This was indeed very influential and was subsequently targeted by IPCC.

Here is the backstory: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/10/hohenkammer-consensus-on-climate-change.html

And my podcast on some of the aftermath: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-i-became-voldemort-in-climate#details

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"Disasters one area where philanthropists have a huge opportunity invest some modest funds to enable the collection and assessment of robust data with global significance."

Ouch! - maybe an "are" between 'Disasters' and "one area"?

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Thanks for the eagle eyes!

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Dr. Pielke ==> There is a HUGE problem with definitions. EM-DAT, definitions include such things as bus crashes -- bus drives cliff in Greece, killing 30 people -- the same as a major hurricane killing hundreds in the Philippines. Each count as 1 disaster. If the bus crash happens in a storm , it might be listed as a weather or climate related disaster just like in the US where car accidents, if they happen during a rain storm, are counted as in "deaths caused by the storm" -- the storm subsequently termed a "deadly storm".

Counting insurance claims by dollars after every weather event is great is one is an insurance company -- but does less to inform the general public about threats and resultant damages.

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Yes, EM-DAT has long had such issues. How to better account for and track disasters is increasingly important.

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Roger: I respect your opinion on the Re-insurance databases and they have clearly helped define the relative impact of hurricanes and I can see the critical value of solid and trustworthy data for evaluating risks and determining insurance prices. However, I just read a SwissRe brochure on climate risks and it appeared to me to be more an effort to "make a market" rather than a real assessment of risks. What is your take on their assessment of climate risks, say for example, property insurance for homes on Martha's Vineyard. etc?

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Yes, there is a large tension between PR/marketing and valid data stewardship.

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They would like to charge more for insurance but they would not be motivated to inaccurately assess costs upwards

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I do not follow. Why wouldn't they be motivated to project costs that justify premiums higher than they actually need to be? Insurance companies make money when they see the risk as lower, for whatever reason, than the person who is buying the insurance. The only check on excessive premium prices is high levels of competition, i.e., competing assessments of risks, and an informed customer base.. For example, if a home-owner can be persuaded that his or her home that sits 10 feet above current high tide level is in danger due to sea level rise of 12 feet instead of 12 inches then the customer is paying for a non-existent risk. Take a look at how SwissRe is positioning themselves. https://www.swissre.com/risk-knowledge/mitigating-climate-risk/climate-change.html

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Insurance rates in many US locations are regulated by state governments. In contrast reinsurance operates as more of a market, thus perceptions matter a great deal in reinsurance pricing, as does whatever happened recently. Contrary to much popular opinion, large loss can be very good for the reinsurance industry.

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The NOAA database is clearly subject to government-wide and agency-specific information quality guidelines issued in 2002. Agency compliance is poor, to be generous, because no one has standing to sue to enforce compliance.

It has been my view for 20 years that public embarrassment is the best available tool for holding agencies accountable. It works, sometimes. Effectiveness depends on how aggressively one embarrasses the agency and whether its leadership is susceptible to embarrassment.

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NOAA seems not to care about how silly their billion$ dataset looks to actual researchers. A great PR tool.

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'Threshold' data say very little about the actual differences between events. What is the difference between 999.999.999$ in damages and 1.000.000.000$?

This also holds for instance for heatwaves, in Belgium where I live a heatwave is defined as follows: 5 days with a max temperature above 25C in a row with three of these five above 30C. Hence +/- 0.1C can make a lot of difference for such a cluster of days to be defined as a heatwave, but makes no difference in the real world.

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I don’t think this phenomenon is peculiar to NOAA.

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