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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

(charleshughsmith.substack.com)
478 points spking | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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phtrivier ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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. arrowsmith ◴[] No.42736522[source]
Isn't that overly pessimistic, not optimistic?

Surely if plants are absorbing more CO2 than we thought, that's a good thing for climate change? (More CO2 absorbed by plants -> less CO2 staying in the atmosphere -> less warming. No?)

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2. a3w ◴[] No.42736701[source]
I think the counting errors were "we expected these sinks to fill up slower. They are already full, and not contribute instead of being a sink".
3. modo_mario ◴[] No.42737223[source]
>(More CO2 absorbed by plants -> less CO2 staying in the atmosphere -> less warming. No?)

The vast vast vast majority of co2 absorbed by plants remains in the carbon cycle. The share that leaves it is in fact ridiculously small.

There's absolutely no reasonable scenario where we wait for plants to deal with the output of the fossil fuels pumped up.

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4. graemep ◴[] No.42738072[source]
Most emitted CO2 also remains in the carbon cycle.

What matters is accumulation at a particular point in the cycle because CO₂ is added to the atmosphere faster than it is removed. If it is removed faster then it ceases to be a problem.

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5. modo_mario ◴[] No.42740127{3}[source]
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It seems to me the first and last line don't really add anything and I don't see why the middle sentence is necessarily true.