Amazingly, we don't believe Christian Aid about climate change damages here
We’re entirely happy to specify that if climate change is happening then there will be damages from climate change happening. Even, that if the process is getting worse then so will the damages. However, we don’t think that excuses this tosh from Christian Aid:
The 10 most expensive weather disasters this year caused more than $170bn in damage, $20bn more than in 2020, a British aid group has found.
Christian Aid said the upward trend reflects the effects of manmade climate change and added that the 10 disasters in question also killed at least 1,075 people and displaced 1.3 million.
Each year, the aid group calculates the cost of weather incidents like flooding, fires and heatwaves according to insurance claims. In 2020, it found the world’s 10 costliest weather disasters caused $150bn in damage, making this year’s total an increase of 13%.
Weather disasters, well, yes. The big thing in climate change research is, well, where are all those super-storms? No, really, significant work is going on try to explain why those predicted aren’t arriving in the numbers predicted.
We might also use those super-sekkret insights available to us from economics. The first of those being that they’re measuring insured losses. Insurance being a luxury, or superior, good. Richer societies devote more of their total income to insurance that is - the peace of mind being something that folks buy more of as the daily grind of finding three squares becomes less of a task.
Economic growth in 2021 has been substantial.
We might also want to add in inflation - if we’re talking about the US we could peg that at 6% or so, which is a substantial fraction of that claimed 13% rise, isn’t it?
We might even go further. The damage from such storms is largely to property, property largely being the thing that is insured too. US house prices have risen 16% of this past year. That is, if there were exactly the same US housing stock, facing exactly the same weather damage, at the recorded price change, we’ve already explained more than Christian Aid’s climate change related increase in damages.
Of course, we can’t add together rising house prices and also GDP and also inflation and also the luxury nature of insurance because that’s counting inflation at least twice and possibly more. But it is entirely possible to say that those features alone more than cover that 13% rise in insured damages. For Christian Aid hasn’t accounted for inflation or any of those others even once.
We’d also like to complain about this practice of pushing out the press release - which is why it’s in the newspapers - without releasing the actual report so that it can be checked.
We’re absolutely delighted to discuss climate change, what we should be doing about it and all that. But even the dangers of that dread event don’t excuse this total tripe that Christian Aid is trying to ladle onto our plates. Measuring insured damages without correcting for inflation, nominal values of assets, GDP growth and the very nature of insurance itself simply isn’t good enough. This gets a ”Grade F. See me after class”.