Is the world becoming uninsurable?

Post by Spivak » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

infecto wrote: post #467

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #283

American, living in area prone to natural disasters: "Is the WHOLE WORLD becoming uninsurable?" The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.

Honest question. Why when people describe wood framed homes do they always phrase it like houses made from "firewood", "sticks", "twigs" etc? It at least for me always detracts from the argument at hand. You could just as easily build a wood framed home with an exterior shell that is fire resistant using modern materials or brick.

Post by hb-robo » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

typewithrhythm wrote: post #167

urhmbutwait wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s insurance? Change the euphemism from government to private insurance to satisfy capitalism gods and keep their giant foot from squishing us… still “on the books” as a co-mingled pool of funds to shift around to solve problems. Aw …sad… other people exist and need resources too. Not just about your first world skin suit playing temp host to a run of the mill electromagnetic field effect.

People choose where they live, and should bear the cost relative to the amount of risk they chose to take. Government funding is not a magical blanket that somehow makes it moral to take from someone who made good decisions and give to another who made poor ones.

Post by marcosdumay » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 2:46 PM UTC

aquaticsunset wrote: post #496

diogocp wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo in 1755 that killed tens of thousands. When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and masonry walls for fire resistance. Nowadays, most new buildings seem to…

Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn that wood is the only appropriate building material and the Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest of trees to construct. The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology was created in California. It's either naive or will…

Post by graemep » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

modo_mario wrote: post #486

arrowsmith wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

>(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.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

megaman821 wrote: post #514

avianlyric wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re ignoring one critical difference between these two scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities, produce heat as a waste product. It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive. So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat th…

It is true that heat is easier to generate. Berlin is considered mild while Phoenix is considered very hot. They just happen to have the same temperature deltas. On the whole, the world spends many, many times more energy heating living spaces than cooling them. The coldest cities people live in just have much larger room temperature deltas than the hottest.