Is the world becoming uninsurable?

An hour in and nobody in these comments is addressing climate change? The risks of drought and the resulting fire or hurricanes and floods is much higher than it has been in recorded history in these areas because of climate change. Should people be forced to abandon their homes because the fossil fuel companies lied and misled the public and bought out our governments for the last 50 years?

IMHO we should be seizing the fossil fuel companies' assets and using them for disaster relief around the world due to the catastrophe they have deliberately caused.

The talk about insurance rates is a deliberate distraction.

> The risks of drought and the resulting fire or hurricanes and floods is much higher than it has been in recorded history in these areas because of climate change

I saw an article on npr [1] which basically agrees with the chart on the blogpost. I 1980, there were 3 disasters a year that cost $1B, inflation adjusted. In 2024, 24. The second chart in the npr article is pretty terrifying.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/10/08/nx-s1-5143320/hurricanes-clim...

Don't agree. Well partially. I also think the privatise the profits socialise the losses story is strong, and the coal and oil interests should pony up more remediation costs.

But insurance is one of the best signals we have to true risk/consequence/likelihood, which commercial interests pay attention to

The best long term outcome here would be rebuilding safer but the downside will be "which excludes the poor" -that's where I think state and federal policy should apply the lever: require socialised housing outcomes.

Price controls on insurance forces socialised losses. Better is some middle ground: mandate insurance, demand adequate mitigations and defences. But losing the price signal is bad.

If you ask Americans to vote to make gas more expensive to stop climate change (eg. the Washington carbon tax referenda), they say no. America burns lots of fossil fuels because it's what the voters want. If every private fossil fuel company shut down tomorrow, there would be riots in the streets, and then oil and gas would be imported from abroad.

Did you miss the part where I said the public has been lied to for the past 50 years?

I didn't say we shut off all the gas pumps tomorrow. It will obviously take time to transition off. I said we seize their assets and use the proceeds for climate relief. We can keep the revenue coming and using the profits for disaster relief while we transition off fossil fuels. It's not that hard to understand.

The losses were already socialized without the controls. Look at how the insurance companies always behave in these situations. They always find a way to stick the public with the bill. Don't listen to the corporate talking points. The price controls may have been stupid but they are a distraction.

The Los Angeles fires are not really about climate change. There have been wildfires there for centuries, it's part of the ecosystem.

Yes I remember as a kid in the 80s when wildfires woukd devastate LA every year. Oh wait no it did not happen until recently.

Yes wildfires do happen in nature. No this is not normal for this area. Yes it is about climate change. Stop believinf fossil fuel company propaganda.

We need a high per-ton carbon tax, with all revenue dividended out per-capita to offset the inflation. This would eliminate the green premium on a great number of clean alternatives and avoid the problems of the government picking where to invest, letting the market handle that instead.

And if those companies don't find other things to do (they'd be quite good at geothermal, or durable carbon sequestration, with all their drilling and fracking expertise), then they'll go bankrupt without needing to do anything so extreme as nationalizing/seizing/whatever.

In some parts of California, fires recur with some regularity. In Oakland, for example, fires of various size and ignition occurred in 1923, 1931, 1933, 1937, 1946, 1955, 1960, 1961, 1968, 1970, 1980, 1990, 1991, 1995, 2002, and 2008. Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County, and Los Angeles County are other examples. Orange and San Bernardino counties share a border that runs north to south through the Chino Hills State Park, with the park's landscape ranging from large green coastal sage scrub, grassland, and woodland, to areas of brown sparsely dense vegetation made drier by droughts or hot summers. The valley's grass and barren land can become easily susceptible to dry spells and drought, therefore making it a prime spot for brush fires and conflagrations, many of which have occurred since 1914. Hills and canyons have seen brush or wildfires in 1914, the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and into today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires

Without accounting for population growth in high risk areas this is meaningless. If the population and housing units in a floodplain doubles, a $500M 1980s disaster becomes a $1B 2024 disaster. That's not to mention the above-inflation increase in the cost of housing which probably bumps these numbers up as well.

The Santa Anas getting stronger is very much related to climate change.

What evidence do you have that these fires have anything to do with climate change? They appear to be adequately explained by the known behavior of the region, and to the extent that they're not the radical increases in habitation and the systematic suppression of small fires is enough to cover any gap.

Ironically there is a great case that varrious environmental groups that vigorously opposed controlled burns are among the greatest proximal human causes of the current situation. If careful analysis concluded so, would you support seizing their assets for use as disaster relief?

Makes sense since even the French people protested a carbon tax back in 2019.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46460445

Stop trying to muddy the waters, we already agree that wildfires do happen. Nobody disputes that. The frequency and intensity of what we are seeing in recent years is what is not normal. That is due to climate change because of the increased frequency and duration of droughts as well as increased winds.

The frequency and intensity of droughts in the area has increased due to climate change. The increased winds is due to climate change. It is obvious. It is not explained by "radical population increase".

Stop trying to distract with fossil fuel propaganda trying to distract with everthing else they can. Yes controlled burns still happen but it is also understandable that people would be jumpy about them with the problems fire has been causing in that area in recent years.

That is a red herring. The frequency and intensity of the wildfires has increased. Stop repeating fossil fuel talking points meant to distract from climate change.

Some relevant reading:

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/01/the-role-of-clima...

The underlying paper is the opposite of convincing.

Essentially they fit a logistic regression of climate measurements the amount of area burned by wild fires each year in the forested parts of northern California to try to express how much is burned as a function e.g. of humidity, temperature, max temp, rainfall, wind, etc. Then the took historical weather data and eliminated the trend in order to try to construct an alternative time-series without human influence then their apply their aforementioned coefficients to figure out how much fire would be had in the counterfactual climate conditions.

To their credit (or perhaps their reviewers credit) the paper does observe the most obvious flaw the wildfires don't work that way-- that fuel builds up over time then is cleared by fires and once an area is burned it can't burn again for a long time. While the structure of the model is such that that if the air gets dry enough it will tell you that will constantly be fire everywhere forever no matter how much has already burned. They constructed a number of dynamic models that attempt to account for that and the increase largely disappears, with a constant level being shown for the next decade. True that the dynamic corrections seem even more adhoc (they don't seem to have data that allows them to fit the dynamic parameters), but the model that ignores these effects is pretty obviously wrong in a meaningful sense.

Even without that correction, their model doesn't fit the last ten years of data with many times the number of acres burned than the model predicts.

Their approach also has the effect that if run on the data from the first third of the study or so, it would instead result in claiming that climate change was reducing wildfires. (because wildfire acres burned were decreasing over that period)

More fundamentally, you could instead run the same analysis using any other measurements that increased over the same period that wildfires in the region increased and the model would come back attributing significant levels of wildfire to it. E.g. plugging in metrics of internet traffic growth into it looks like it would probably work even better. (See also: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations )