Is the world becoming uninsurable?

Even pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to buildings (other than war, which to my knowledge never was insurable) in most areas of the world.

A significant portion of human structures are located close to the coast (seaborne trade having been a huge enabler of economic development for a few hundred years) and are exposed to flooding from rising sea levels, or built in valleys that are increasingly at risk from flooding due to far-above-long-term-historic-norms precipitation runoff (higher atmospheric temps lead to more energy in weather systems; see eg massive floods in Europe in the past few years).

Seems like having the ocean at your door would be bad for the structure? Or burning down in a hot dry period…

I don't know about that. The Iberian peninsula is not historically at much risk for natural disasters, and we now suffer alternating forest fires and floods pretty much every year...

Except for Fire?

Compared to the other challenges climate change poses those are fairly simple engineering problems. The Netherlands manage fine with large parts of the country below sea level.

Why would a city like London or Paris burn down in a hot dry period?

You literally pulled this take out of your ass. Water and fire can shockingly ruin buildings.

and sea level rises are slow enough that countries with more high ground than The Netherlands can just not rebuild/maintain old houses in vulnerable positions and build higher (often just a bit further in) instead.

Some buildings buy the coast (especially in port cities) and have steep rises anyway.

There is a huge threat of cultural loss - e.g. Venice.

I remember forest fires yearly in northern Spain in the 80s. Are they more violent now?

You're refuting a lot of established facts about the risks of climate change, in a way that seems indicative of a certain ideology. Can you explain more what your position is?

Climate change deals frequency, rather than novelty. Oh and as crypto bros like to say: we're early.

Said the American living in a log cabin in Montana. But if you're from, say, Tuvalu, or Venice, the 15cm rise of the last decades is definitely noticeable, and the trend has no reason to stop or decrease.

My position is that climate change is an existential threat to civilization, but buildings are not at a risk that would make them uninsurable. We build cities both in very wet and very hot and dry climates without much trouble. Those are engineering problems we can solve without much trouble.

Agreed - Where I live now, 8 thousand years ago I could have walked all the way from the UK to Holland.

Even just 1000 years ago the coastline here went four miles out to sea compared to today.

In the last 20 year we've seen the erosion of the coastline here accelerating - regular news stories about people losing their houses to the sea: https://www.norfolk.gov.uk/article/56352/Challenges-of-coast...

It doesn't matter if you think it is human caused or not, the sea level is undeniably rising:

https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha....

> Even pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to buildings

Floods, storms, droughts, fire? They appear to be getting worse.

More restrictive codes designed for better fireproofing buildings, for instance, can solve a number of problems in California in fire prone areas. Another thing that has a political solution is forest management. Lack of water can be solved by desalination, which becomes an energy problem rather than a water one. Very dry areas can benefit from solar panels because they reduce water loss from evaporation, thus reducing the pressure on water supplies.

It is expensive, but that's another problem.

1666 has entered the chat.

A few critical ingredients being: no denialism about their vulnerability, strong social and economic commitment to reducing vulnerability, lack of reflexively blaming floods on illegal immigrants or trans people

But with lots more money, which is what insurance deals with

Of course they’re insurable at some premium. The question is whether there is any premium someone is willing to pay that can also cover the risk.

The Netherlands has been planning for the impacts of sea-level rise for decades now. At least twenty years ago the government broached the idea (with TV commercials) that they were going to have to abandon some are areas to the sea.

it used to be reported that Venice is sinking into the water but now the climate nut jobs have flipped it to it’s actually because it’s rising. I guess it’s all relative

Sea level naturally varies (if we define it liberally). It's at the times of maximums - high tide plus storm surge - we notice, otherwise it's easy to miss.

But when those high tides plus storm surges hit, we really notice sea level rise.

It's difficult to not be sarcastic but let me try my best: Venice sinking is what happens when water is rising.

You’re ignoring things like the geological conditions in the Netherlands, they have very peaty soil which is fairly impermeable to water. Which makes the task of keep the sea back pretty easy, you just build a big wall.

But if you look in places like Florida, the ground conditions there are substantially more porous. If you try to keep the sea back there with a simple wall, it’ll just flow under the wall through the soil. You would have to dig all the way to bedrock and install some kind of impermeable barrier to prevent most of Florida from flooding due to sea level rise. Something that’s unbelievably cost prohibitive to do.

The Netherlands only exists below sea level because their ground conditions meant it was possible to pump out the country using technology available in the 1740s. If the ground conditions weren’t basically perfect for this kind of geo-engineering, the Netherlands simply wouldn’t exist as it does today.

You’re using an example that exists purely as a result of survivorship bias, as an argument that it’s practical to apply the same techniques or achieve the same outcomes anywhere else. Completely ignoring the fact that your example only exists because a unique set of geologic conditions made it possible, and those conditions are far from universal, and not in anyway correlated with places we humans would like to protect.

Eh, Venice is also sinking regardless of sea level rise. That’s what happens when you build a city on top of what is practically a swamp. No surprise that big heavy buildings put on top of loose, waterlogged soil are gonna slowly sink into that soil.

Karst Topography enters the room....

That's not really true. The introduction of so much extra energy into the atmosphere is going to make weather extremes worse all over the world, and harder to predict as historical models become less relevant. Large scale pattern changes like the AMOC shutting down are going to completely change many local weather patterns so that e.g. places that have little history of tornados will start having them, or places that used to be too wet for wildfires will suddenly experience them in extreme drought conditions. Despite scientists' best efforts, we're running a global experiment with no control group and predictions will only become more difficult the harder we push the system into a new state.

It's also a social coordination problem. For example a neighborhood where all the homes have to be fire resistant is going to fare a lot better, and probably be cheaper for the individual home owners to build and insure, than the one fire-resistant home in a neighborhood of tinder boxes. I don't think the prognosis is good for the U.S. in that regard. We have very little social cohesion and a lot of parties interested in making the situation worse for their own benefit.

Also they don't blame the climate or weather on democrats there.

I forgot that one! The Dems controlling the weather. Big one!

London is at much more risk of flooding. Parts of London were built on wetlands not much above sea level, and there’s a big river running right through the middle.

Mostly they seem to have planted a lot more Eucalyptus, which makes the fires worse. The severe floods on the other hand seem to be catching everyone by surprise.