Yesterday, the Globe reported on a new special report from the IPCC predicting “an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters”:
“We mostly experience weather and climate through the extreme,” said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who is one of the report’s top editors. “That’s where we have the losses. That’s where we have the insurance payments. That’s where things have the potential to fall apart.
“There are lots of places that are already marginal for one reason or another,” Field said. But it’s not just poor areas: “There is disaster risk almost everywhere.”
So what was the chance that later in the day I would get a newsletter from my insurance agency warning me to expect my home insurance premiums, which had been mostly steady (adjusted for inflation) over the last ten years, to rise? They blame… the changes in climate that have led to more weather disasters. Just last year in Massachusetts, increased claim payments – exceeding the amount insurance companies took in via premiums – have been required to pay for the damage due to everything from ice dams to tornadoes to the freak October snow storm. The newsletter notes that this has been part of a pattern of an increase in “catastrophic claims” in recent years. Therefore, premiums must go up.
Everyone knows the role of health care costs for individuals, businesses, and as a budget buster for local and state governments. Is climate change about to join or even surpass it?
This sounds like something the media (or at least some portions of the media) might find interesting.
The property insurance industry is reality-based, and their business model and profitability depends on guessing right about risks. I think it’s very hard to sustain a claim that the property insurance industry is basing these increases on some vast liberal conspiracy. Of course, an insurance agency is not the same as an insurance company.
It would be helpful to offer some specifics about the agency and the newsletter — I think you may be onto something here.
I can’t find an electronic version of the newsletter, but Google provides plenty of media reports confirming the information contained within:
Homeowners Insurance Rates To Rise In 2012 (NPR):
While Home Prices May Be Falling, Insurance Premiums Are on the Rise (WSJ):
Home insurance rates likely to go higher (USA Today):
Brown all of a sudden like transfers to the Maryland National Guard and, the next day we learn the head of the Mass Guard is being investigated for rape…
Did you know that the chances of being hit by lightning 50 times are better than winning Megamillions. Just sayin’
Actually, the odds of winning the MegaMilions jackpot are 1 in 175,711,536.
And the odds of being struck by lightning in the United State in at any point in a given year is about one in a million (1 in 1,000,000).
So, you are actually more than 175 times more likely to be struck by lightening at some point in the coming year than you are to win the MegaMillions jackpot with a single ticket.
And “playing” the “hit buy lightning game” is free.
What are the odds of hitting the lottery today and getting struck by lightning tomorrow? Greater or less than shipping out the day before your boss gets investigated?
extreme weather disasters must we see before Progressives give climate change the same kind of attention they give to consumer finance?
The political calculation is that we can win on consumer finance, but it is very difficult to win on climate change. The threat is too abstract, too distant, too invisible.
The tragedy: When it stops being abstract, distant, and invisible, it will be too late.
When you said that the threat was abstract, distant, and invisible and that once it became otherwise it would be too late my mind turned immediately to our recent venture in Iraq. Seems to me, the threat of Iraq having or using WMDs could have been described the same way, yet President Bush made the case that “the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud”; in other words, too late once it was that obvious. If he could rally us to war on those terms we should be able to rally the nation to address this, especially since our evidence is a lot better.
(1) The Bush Administration did an admirable job of tying Iraq to 9/11. Cheney and others asserted a connection. Bush made a point of always mentioning them in the same breath. 9/11 was very concrete. Progressives simply cannot get away with such duplicitous distortions.
(2) Demonization is a proven political device. Where is climate change’s Saddam Hussein?
(3) Through the magic of Republican accounting, the Iraq War led to no tax increases. Confronting climate change now does require some sacrifice — albeit much less than confronting it later will impose.
Admittedly my previous comment was a tad snarky, but only a tad. Here’s how I would counter the points.
1) If we need a disaster, try Katrina, or any number of extreme weather phenomena that can be linked to climate change. Those “100-year” events are becoming rather frequent it seems.
2) Who is Saddam Huseein? Try BP; try the Koch Brothers. There are others I’m sure.
3) We can minimize the sacrafice if we do it right, but any sacrafice on this issue pales in comparison to the thousands of lives lost in war.
Once again, it seems the liberals are unable/unwilling to craft a pointed message.
Do you blame Al Gore for all this too?
You can’t have it both ways. The right wing accomplishes its means through its willingness to brazenly and flagrantly lie, and through it’s frequent use of epithets and “names”.
For example, the right wing joined with the USCCB to brand President Obama’s decision to mandate contraceptive coverage as an “attack on religion”. That is clearly a lie, yet you were unwilling to join those of us who called this out as the lie that it is — you seemed more committed to defending the USCCB. Similarly, you frequently chastise me for being more blunt than you’re comfortable with — for example, describing Allen West and Clarence Thomas as “Uncle Tom” token figures.
You write “Once again, it seems the liberals are unable/unwilling to craft a pointed message.” As one of the “liberals” here, I would appreciate it if I got more support and less push-back from you when I, and those like me, offer our pointed messages.
I don’t think it’s necessary to lie to win — an advantage of advocating the liberal position is that generally the facts are on our side. I do think it is necessary to call out racism, misogyny, and xenophobia when those things happen. In particular, in a political climate where the institutional Catholic church (as represented by the USCCB, for example) has chosen to ally itself with the rabid-right wing on certain social issues (such as contraception, abortion, gender preference, women’s rights), and be stone silent on others, then I think it’s necessary to decide which side you’re on YOURSELF before you chastise “liberals” for being “unable/unwilling to craft a pointed message”. This week, Vicki Kennedy — the widow of Senator Ted Kennedy — was dis-invited from giving the commence address at Anna Maria College in Paxton, MA. Yet another micro-example of the institutional Catholic church silencing a liberal voice.
Where is the USCCB on global warming? Where are the demands that communion be denied politicians who deny the reality of global warming? The people who suffered most from the way our government mis-handled Hurricane Katrina were overwhelmingly black. The comparisons between America’s response to 9/11 and our response to Hurricane Katrina are striking, and speak to the pervasive racism embedded in our cultural DNA. When terrorists struck at the heart of corporate (white) America, our response was fast, furious, intense, and prolonged. When nature struck at the heart of America’s indigenous black culture — New Orleans and the Mississippi delta — our response was slow, half-hearted, meager, and short-lived.
The science of global warming is compelling and clear — as are the demographics. The vast majority of the victims of global warming, at least initially, are likely to non-white and non-American. Sadly, to all too many Americans, the result is “so what”.
I don’t think liberals are “unable/unwilling to craft a pointed message”. I think, instead, that too many of us are reluctant to actually see, name, and reject the reality of the true nature of today’s American right wing, Tea Party, and GOP.
You’re saying we didn’t have enough tornadoes? How many’ll it take?
The Iraq War was to remove the “demon”. By contrast, global warming won’t be stopped by busting up BP or throwing the Koch Brothers in jail.
You’re right, I don’t like name-calling; it’s both wrong and ultimately unhelpful. I stand by the comments of mine to which you linked. However, there is nothing wrong with prophetic truth and exposing people’s motives to the light of day. I am in fact looking for the right balance, which probably comes somewhere between you and the President.
Kbusch, we have plenty of extreme weather; that was my point. I do think global warming would at least be slowed if our policies didn’t cater so much to the likes of BP and Koch.
I apologize for becoming perhaps overly personal — you “push a button” for me when you attack “liberals” for “being unable/unwilling to craft a pointed message.”
I suggest that in order to transform AGW into a winnable political issue, we need passion. The right wing has that, in spades, and too many of us lack it. I am often frustrated with your comments here because I often have the sense that your goal is to remove passion and replace it with logic and calm reason. I suggest, instead, the we need both. Passion without logic and reason is pure sentimentality. Logic and reason without passion is lifeless dogma.
Here’s a metaphor I like: gunpowder, when poured into a pile and lit with a match, merely burns. If you want an explosion, the gunpowder must be constrained by a container. In my view, passion is the gunpowder and logic and reason are the container.
Passionate people must cross the boundaries of comfort — generally, people will not change until forced out of their comfort-zone. Perhaps the best answer is that both styles are needed. Somebody has to agitate enough to get people’s attention, and do so in a way that forces uncomfortable truths back into the discussion. Somebody has to reform the resulting disorder into a sustainable whole that reflects the reality of those uncomfortable truths.
Perhaps each of us, as representative of these two styles, might be slower about criticizing — and more explicit about acknowledging the benefits of — the other.
…via Addicting Info, though if the implication of the term treatment is that deniers are mentally ill, then that is an example of going too far that I’m just as happy to leave to the right wing.
I think that article was meant as a joke.
A dozen years ago, I might have expected we could convince people by rational argument to deal with climate change. A dozen months ago, I believed the problem was the ascendency of conservative ideology. Today, after slogging through Predictably Irrational, What Makes Your Brain Happy and the like, I’m more inclined to think that our cognitive wiring is mal-adapted to this challenge.
…I think your comment above titled “Passion” is right on the money!
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