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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

(charleshughsmith.substack.com)
478 points spking | 1 comments | 17 Jan 25 00:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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phtrivier ◴[17 Jan 25 08:26 UTC] No.42735258[source]▶
Former CEO of AXA, a major French insurer, famously announced that a world at +4°C would be "uninsurrable" [1].

That was 10 years ago.

It's true that most predictions about climate are wrong - most of the time, they're optimistic. (Not always, fortunately [2])

[1] https://www.leparisien.fr/economie/business/special-cop21-un...

[2] https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/emissions-are-no-longer-fo...

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graemep ◴[17 Jan 25 10:16 UTC] No.42735974[source]▶
> most of the time, they're optimistic.

Evidence? Has anyone collated predictions over time and compared them with outcomes to date?

I can remember a number of specific predictions (e.g. that snow would be unknown in most of the UK by the early 2000s) that were pessimistic. Of course, I recall those because they got a lot of media attention at the time and the media reporting is biased to the most extreme predictions so its not a fair sample.

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soniman ◴[17 Jan 25 10:32 UTC] No.42736079[source]▶
HN just had a "Whoops we undercounted plant C02 absorption by 40% for the last 40 years" post so I would say the errors mostly go in one direction.
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1. krisoft ◴[17 Jan 25 10:57 UTC] No.42736245[source]▶
I don't understand this reasoning. How does the presence of a single recent post on HN say anything about if the errors go in one direction or in both directions?