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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

charleshughsmith.substack.com

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Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#971

Post by bdauvergne »

Aloisius wrote: post #904
bdauvergne wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the recent events in California I have seen many photos of burnt houses with unburnt trees around. I think those houses were especially flammable more than some vegetation around it seems. After the fire nothing remained but the chimneys. I have never seen any house burn like that in Europe. I live along the Mediterranean sea in France, many wood fires every summer, with wind above 100km/h; never seen so many ho…

> along the Mediterranean sea in France, with wind above 100km/h And what's the humidity? The Santa Ana winds that affect LA are extremely dry and gusty with < 10% relative humidity. It is hard to compare them to anything else.

I really don't know, we never talk about humidity here, only about rain (it rains few days each year, but a lot).

Apparently it's more than 60% year long: https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Humidity-per...

I agree climate is a bit special in south California, but what is usually done here when a fire is near a house is for the owner to sprinkle it before the fire is coming; if you take time to sprinkle the roof (which is the only part containing wood here) there is less chance for an ignition.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#972

Post by pokerface_86 »

blharr wrote: post #641
horsawlarway wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and some wind/debris damage exactly like the blown over trees you mention. Houses generally aren't destroyed by hurricanes in the sense of "the storm literally ripped them up", they're made uninhabitable by storm surges (flood). The scary ones are tornados. And tornados do genuinely fuck shit up. Even in those "enlightened" parts of the world you think have proper bu…

Tornados might be more intense but only for a short period of time and in a small area. I don't see any of those where the tornado is lasting days, causing sustained damage. There are some where there are multiple tornadoes in a span, but each individual tornado is itself quick and violent but localized within a mile or so at most. Compare some incidents with, Hurricane Sandy, for example, where it traveled across th…

tornadoes and hail are actually a big driver of property insurance rates. they typically aren’t catastrophic but the frequency is increasing quickly and they do cause an aggregation of claims.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#973

Post by nullc »

WaltPurvis wrote: post #926
nullc wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence do you have that these fires have anything to do with climate change? They appear to be adequately explained by the known behavior of the region, and to the extent that they're not the radical increases in habitation and the systematic suppression of small fires is enough to cover any gap. Ironically there is a great case that varrious environmental groups that vigorously opposed controlled burns are am…

Some relevant reading: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/01/the-role-of-clima...

The underlying paper is the opposite of convincing.

Essentially they fit a logistic regression of climate measurements the amount of area burned by wild fires each year in the forested parts of northern California to try to express how much is burned as a function e.g. of humidity, temperature, max temp, rainfall, wind, etc. Then the took historical weather data and eliminated the trend in order to try to construct an alternative time-series without human influence then their apply their aforementioned coefficients to figure out how much fire would be had in the counterfactual climate conditions.

To their credit (or perhaps their reviewers credit) the paper does observe the most obvious flaw the wildfires don't work that way-- that fuel builds up over time then is cleared by fires and once an area is burned it can't burn again for a long time. While the structure of the model is such that that if the air gets dry enough it will tell you that will constantly be fire everywhere forever no matter how much has already burned. They constructed a number of dynamic models that attempt to account for that and the increase largely disappears, with a constant level being shown for the next decade. True that the dynamic corrections seem even more adhoc (they don't seem to have data that allows them to fit the dynamic parameters), but the model that ignores these effects is pretty obviously wrong in a meaningful sense.

Even without that correction, their model doesn't fit the last ten years of data with many times the number of acres burned than the model predicts.

Their approach also has the effect that if run on the data from the first third of the study or so, it would instead result in claiming that climate change was reducing wildfires. (because wildfire acres burned were decreasing over that period)

More fundamentally, you could instead run the same analysis using any other measurements that increased over the same period that wildfires in the region increased and the model would come back attributing significant levels of wildfire to it. E.g. plugging in metrics of internet traffic growth into it looks like it would probably work even better. (See also: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations )

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#974

Post by pas »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #913
daveguy wrote: post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the list of tornadoes the GP refers to in Europe are mostly F0-F2 severity. These don't often cause high fatalities and injuries in the US either (on par with what's reported there). The problem is that tornadoes in the US Midwest and Southeast are often in the F3-F5 range, which are much deadlier. An F3 tornado includes winds to 165 mph, which is considered a category 5 in the hurricane scale. They don't last…

The quantity of energy in an F5 tornado is literally on the same scale as a nuclear weapon, albeit delivered more slowly. Given that context, their ability erase towns should not be that surprising. You can't engineer a practical structure capable of withstanding those kinds of forces.

Of course you can. Arcologies! Super practical, compact, safe, efficient! Tornadoes do most of the damage at the bottom, so taller structures gain advantage. If there's a huge mass pushing down on the bottom parts the tornado won't be able to dislodge it.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#975

Post by pas »

MattGaiser wrote: post #136
harimau777 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The profit margin doesn't include things like CEO salary, correct? I could see a scenario where the issue is still corporate greed just not greed that's measured by profit.

Executive pay is such a tiny fraction that eliminating it would be lost in period to period fluctuations.

One one hand true, on the other hand running all these huge corporations are not cheap. United has 440 000 employees. And who knows how many subcontractors, and so on.

The end-to-end cost society spends on paperpushing is easily hundreds of billions of dollars per year. (Including time lost while waiting on hold to call them, the actual literal work of dealing with these fucking printouts at each stakeholder, the extra effort placed on the paper industry, the postal service, and so on.)

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#976

Post by infecto »

klodolph wrote: post #818
infecto wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less about the question (that has been asked so much now its tiring) but more on how when people do ask it, they always ask in such a negative way. Its not why are so many homes built out of timber/wood but rather why are they built out of sticks?

“Stick-built” is the name for it. There are two main ways to build a house out of wood. You can go for stick-built construction or timber framing. Homes in the US were mostly timber framed until the early 1900s. Advancements in tools and manufacturing techniques has resulted in stick-built homes becoming dominant in the US since then. If you search for “stick-built” you’ll see pictures and encyclopedia articles descr…

yes for sure stick framing is a term but thats not what people are talking about when they say the houses are built out of twigs, sticks or firewood. We are not talking about the building term of stick-framing.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#978

Post by to11mtm »

palmfacehn wrote: post #967
rs999gti wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Insurance needs to be not-for-profit or a government enterprise. There are many examples of this in the insurer of last resort, which are non-profit or government insurance when the private insurance can no longer cover. Insurers of last resort have the same issues with denying claims and not paying out like the private insurers. If you read the OP article, the only people asking for not-for-profit or government in…

>This may mean some consumers will be priced out of insurance policies. It will also further incentivize innovation in safety features.

Politically speaking it easily becomes untenable. (Even if, the conversation could lead to better solutions.)

Existing homeowners could easily get excluded from insurance, and/or be 'locked-in' on their home due to inability to sell it vs cost to make it salable.

There are examples even from the CA fires of properly designed and landscaped houses doing very very well amidst structures now practically uncrecognizable in original form. Most of the tech is there, but attempts to force it would have n-order effects leading to the political unpopularity.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#979

Post by to11mtm »

Weird thing to note, my understanding is that at least in the US, the accident rate and overall cost for claims in Auto has gone up substantially post COVID.

Nobody's quite sure how much of it is the extended time not driving, knock-on effects of isolation, or something else [0], but it -is- something insurance companies are paying attention to from various angles.

Another factor less noted, is the challenge of insuring various parties against 'nuclear verdicts' [1], at least as far as 'is the world becoming becoming uninsurable'...

[0] - Could be anything from Visibility of Full-Size SUVs/Trucks, changes in policing of speeding, increase in vehicles with HP/weight ratios outside of experience range, long COVID, the answer isn't fully clear...

[1] - Basically, a legal gap where certain states don't cap judgements such that, in the 'intended reason' allows a clear historical negligence to increase damages, in the less than intended reason you've got lawyers going on fishing expeditions to raise their claim amount... IDK how I feel about it but am giving my understanding.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#980

Post by heavyset_go »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #961
heavyset_go wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it A lot of the responsibility falls upon governments who are lobbied by developers to zone areas for development that should never have been zoned for development in the first place.

And a lot of the responsibility falls upon the developers that lobby the government for ~. They're not little children begging an adult for something bad for them, where it's the adult that should have known better. They're adults actively seeking out a deal that profits them at expense of people.

Agreed
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