If you are going to bet real money on this stuff, learn everything and trust no one.
From Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 2:
We have been posting on the intersection of insurance and climate/weather since the blog began. Some of the more recent stuff:
Back in early August's "Insurance: Hannover Re Reports Earnings Up 29%, Makes Munich Re Look Incompetent" I mentioned Munich Re's approach to reporting disasters:
When the guys from München reported disappointing results yesterday, operating profit down 46%, net down 35%, they really stressed the impact of this spring's Central European floods and the "poor" investment climate....This is not an anomaly, Munich Re has been the most vocal of all the reinsurers in blaming climate change for their management failures.
From Early September' "Hurricane Watch: Humberto Should Become the Season's First Hurricane Later Today (Munich Re are still a bunch of bozos)":
...*The 2013 season has come within a whisker of having the latest first hurricane of the season. If Humberto had held off until 8 a.m. EDT on Wednesday it would have come in later than 2002's Gustav when he made his debut on September 11, 2002.Investing on the basis of what they say would lead to financial disaster.
This does not square with the hype-n-tout of Munich Re, which alone among the big insurers is hellbent on ascribing to AGW things they know aren't true, see last year's Spiegel article "The Disaster Business: Scientists Denounce Dubious Climate Study by Insurer" for a layman's explanation of what they're up to.
As late as this spring Peter Höppe, head of Geo Risks Research at Munich Re was being quoted spouting balderdash:
“Numerous studies assume a rise in summer drought periods in North America in the future and an increasing probability of severe cyclones relatively far north along the U.S. East Coast in the long term”He knows, and anyone who follows this stuff knows, the research points 180 degrees in the opposite direction, see for example the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper "Model projections of atmospheric steering of Sandy-like superstorms":
Or the forthcoming U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (via the NYT's DotEarth):AbstractSuperstorm Sandy ravaged the eastern seaboard of the United States, costing a great number of lives and billions of dollars in damage. Whether events like Sandy will become more frequent as anthropogenic greenhouse gases continue to increase remains an open and complex question. Here we consider whether the persistent large-scale atmospheric patterns that steered Sandy onto the coast will become more frequent in the coming decades. Using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 5 multimodel ensemble, we demonstrate that climate models consistently project a decrease in the frequency and persistence of the westward flow that led to Sandy’s unprecedented track, implying that future atmospheric conditions are less likely than at present to propel storms westward into the coast.
Climate campaigners seem to think they have a winner with this takedown of elected officials who reject global warming science, in which fake news reports talk of the turmoil and tragedy created by Hurricane Marco Rubio, Hurricane James Inhofe, Hurricane John Boehner and more.The trouble is, the science on a connection between hurricanes and global warming is going in the opposite direction, if the near-final draft of next month’s climate science assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is any indication.
See a snapshot from that draft below.
IPCC This chart is from a near-final draft of the forthcoming science assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Confidence that global warming is increasing intense tropical cyclone activity has dropped since the panel’s 2007 report (blue is the confidence level now; red the level in 2007). The climate panel stresses that drafts are not final. Click for a larger version.The blue lettering in the statement of confidence levels is the current state of scientific knowledge (mostly drawn from the panel’s recent Extreme Events special report). The red lettering was language from the 2007 report. (Of course, as panel officials have stressed, drafts are “works in progress” until the report is approved by governments and formally released, but it’s rare to see substantive changes this late in the game.)...MOREThe trouble with deceit or more charitably, spin, on the scale Munich Re practices it is it can screw up your entire weltanschauung....
For comparison/contrast we have quite a few posts on Berkshire Hathaway's approach to climate change vis-a-vis its insurance/reinsurance operations, I'll probably put them together in a link post or, if interested, use the search blog box, keywords Berkshire, Buffett, climate, global warming, wind, etc, etc.
More to come.
