UPDATE: graph of damage losses including 2012 posted below. It says all that needs to be said.
This ad is running in rotation at the NYT today, and it needs an application of Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.’s handy bullshit button.
Steve Milloy writes at junkscience.com:
Insurers know that bad weather comes and goes… and after it comes, it’s not likely to come again for a long time… that’s why they’re called “100-year” storms.
There at that website they write:
Superstorm Sandy devastates the east coast with heavy winds and storm surges that flood major cities and shorelines while dumping record snow in West Virginia and knocking out power as far away as Cleveland, OH.
…
Unpredictable weather seems to be the new norm.
I call BS on that last sentence.
Sandy was not only predicted, many meteorologists nailed the path well in advance. In fact, some have called it ‘Their finest hour’:
From CCM Mike Smith:
Here is the European computer model’s forecast made at 2pm last Wednesday. It shows a hurricane near the coast of New Jersey or DelMarVa yesterday evening. The computer models showed more and more of the details of this ferocious storm as the time grew nearer.
The U.S. models didn’t do well, at first, taking the storm out to sea. But, human forecasters at AccuWeather and elsewhere put their knowledge and experience to work and leaned on the European heavily to get preliminary warnings and preparatory advice 4.5 days in advance. Those forecasts stayed consistent and got more detailed as time passed. By Saturday, we were predicting the flooding of the subway and two airports in NYC.
You’d think The Hartford insurance group would have experts for this and would have looked at the IPCC SREX report. But then again, they may just be out for gouging profiting at the expense of the stupid.
Dr Roger Pielke Jr observes:
===============================================================
The full IPCC Special Report on Extremes is out today, and I have just gone through the sections in Chapter 4 that deal with disasters and climate change. Kudos to the IPCC — they have gotten the issue just about right, where “right” means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest — sometimes it just takes a little while.
A few quotable quotes from the report (from Chapter 4):
-
“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”
-
“The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados”
-
“The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”
The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:
“Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses (e.g., Mills, 2005; Höppe and Grimm, 2009), but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.”
He was prescient with this:
You may find yourself having to use the bullshit button in locations that are supposed to be credible, such as Nature Climate Change and the New York Times.
But, I’ll bet he didn’t think it would be used on advertising.
===============================================================
If I were a Hartford customer, I’d be on the phone with my agent, and not to order additional insurance.
UPDATE: Pielke Jr. adds this. 2012 was no Katrina year.
The graph above shows an updated estimate of the 1900 to 2012 normalized hurricane losses for the United States. The normalization methodology is described in Pielke et al. 2008 (here in PDF) and the data presented in the graph comes from the ICAT Damage Estimator, which extends the analysis of Pielke at al. through 2011.
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@Joe Kirklin … not quite right. Your characterization of Capitalism is flawed.
Caveat Emptor is not a justification for bad behaviour, it is simply a warning that there are bad players out there. If someone delivers poor service, sells you shoddy product or misrepresents what you’re being sold (or its need) then each is a form of fraud. Nothing in Capitalist theory justifies that. Before tort lawyers screwed the system, the purpose of torts was to remedy those injustices.
While you’re generally correct that a demand will find its supply, this is not a legitimate rationale for the supplier to be drumming up demand by misrepresenting need. Fraud is fraud no matter what your political persuasion. (And yes, I’m sure the insurers are filling their brochures and contract forms with enough caveats and qualifiers to cover themselves from actual charges of fraud. Still …. )
The NYT also ran an editorial today, by a Constitutional Law Professor from Georgetown Law. This distinguished professor advocated…eliminating the Constitution. That opinion piece, the subject of this story…you’d almost think the Times was an advocate, not a news reporting organization.
Think: “re-insurance”. Hartford only pays fully up to a certain amount, beyond which *their* insurance kicks in and they only pay a percentage …
Firstly, thanks to Anthony for acknowledging the work of Steve Milloy. It was through Milloy’s “Junkscience” site that I found WUWT, a long time ago.
He has done sterling work on things like DDT, various chemical scare campaigns and the like over many years. His site has valuable resource archives on these issues. Currently, he is holding the EPA’s feet to the fire about experiments they conducted using humans where they knowingly exposed them to allegedly dangerous levels of particulates.
Kevin Kilty, if you imagine that Milloy doesn’t understand exactly what a ‘one in 100 year event’ means, you have mistaken your man. Please explain what is wrong with his analysis, instead of throwing grenades and disappearing.
Louis asked whether the record-breaking temperature statistics are true. In a way, it doesn’t matter. All records are made to be broken, like pie crusts.
As for the feeble attempt at satire by somebody-or-other about insurance companies just giving customers what they want, calling them to account about the facts is also part of the operation of a free market. Slither away, pal.
Yes, when that Hartford ad said “Unpredictable weather seems to be the new norm”, there is no other logical way to interpret that statement than that they meant that it couldn’t be predicted, say, 100 hours in advance. It would be just completely and utterly bizarre to interpret that statement any other way.
Is there a “Strawman of the Year” award here at WUWT?
REPLY: YES, and you’ve won it for the strawman you created in this comment! CONGRATULATIONS! Don Pardo, what do we have for our lucky winner?
Pardo: Joel will be getting an all expense taxpayer funded trip to the next COP19 conference and a certificate suitable for framing.
R.I.C.O? Course its just another corrupt organization feeding at the trough.
Insurance we profit from your hazard.
Off topic what post, was on the change from using 15C as the reference Mean Global Temperature to using 14C ?
More Hansen adjusting history to suit, but I can’t get the search name right or was it not on WUWT? Too much liquid wisdom.
The insurers *know* what’s been going on, which gives them the courage to offer a low-risk product with new premiums. Pity they have to lie to do it.
NetDr says:
December 31, 2012 at 10:45 am
“Thermodynamics says that wind speed is proportional to the difference of temperature not absolute temperature !”
Wait for the hilarious media interpretation out soon, at news stand near you!
Rising global temperatures are causing more wind, which have a windchill factor that drives down temperatures and cool the planet. making it appear that temperatures are not actually rising alarmingly /sarc
Any day now, just you Wait! lol
As a civil engineer who prepares flood insurance studies and other hydrology studies. I would like to clarify what we mean by a “100 year storm”. The term 100 year storm only implies that the odds of a said event occuring are one in 100. It does not mean that said event only occurs once every 100 years. You can have a period where the 100 year event occurs two or three time in a short period of time (say 5-10 years). But it may be preceded or followed with prolonged periods where that event does not occur. It is simply the odds of a given event occuring. And of course the estimation of these events occuring are based upon historical statistical data. And we all know how long and accurate that data is. A high frequency of low probablity type events in more recent times may suggest that these events are not “100 year events”. They may only be 20 year events now that we have better data to analyze. I know that in Arizona we only have 50-100 years worth of data to determine said return events.
Another way to understand this concept is to visit the roulette wheel at your favorite Casino. Your favorite number 13 does not come up for 100 straight spins. Does that mean that the odds of 13 hitting is less than one in 38? Of course not, it is simply a natural phenomenom called luck. What if that number 25 that hit 3 times in 12 spins? Would you now assume that the odds of number 25 hitting is one in four? Only alarmist AGW mouthpeices would proclaim such.
The definition of “extreme weather” is now so loose and wide that a legal case challenging Hartford’s refusal to pay up in any weather event that creates a bit of localised mayhem, ie “extreme weather” in the new alarmist definition, might just find the insurance companies have been thoroughly hoisted on their own petard of greed and deliberate obfuscation.
mpainter says:
December 31, 2012 at 5:11 pm
Liam McGhee,
Chairman, President, and CEO,
The Hartford Company.
Dear Sir:
Your ad in the New York Times December 31, 2012, “Extreme Weather is on the Rise” is incorrect, ……… I further advise that you consult your legal staff concerning the potential exposure of The Hartford Company to action brought by those who were inveigled into purchasing a Hartford policy due to marketing based on such fraudulent claims. Your attorneys can also advise on the question of criminal liabilities that may arise against Hartford agents, marketing personnel and executives, including yourself, connected with such fraudulent marketing….
======================================================================
Hmmm …. I know there are laws in some states against price gouging in an emergency and/or disaster. Might those laws also apply somehow here? Probably not but maybe they should.
Everyone knows that the weather has become more benign over time. Just look how much more pleasant the climate is for the Eskimos and the Greenlanders. However, given the over sensational reporting of so called natural disasters by the irresponsible media, it is no wonder that people ‘think’ that there are more extreme weather events. This feeds in well with the communists’ modus operandi of wanting to bankrupt the government by agitating that the victims of these rather mild weather events should get government assistance. No wonder the government is going broke. The government should stay out of peoples’ lives and let them get out of the mess themselves. America didn’t become a great nation by looking after the disadvantaged, it got great because of the power of individual initiative and people solving their own problems and getting an advantage over their competitors.
One must also ask why the so called victims suffered adversely by the weather events. Some people say it is due to their crimes against the Almighty. Athough I don’t believe that theory, it does have some merit an worth considering.
It doesn’t take much for the insurance companies to get on the bandwagon and use this nonsense about extreme weather events to increase their premiums by 30 to 50% . I know mine has increased by this amount and I didn’t even make a claim last year.
No, you’re just cherry picking! Everybody & 97% of all Climatologists know that you have to look at the last 30 years, so OMG!
With added NaCl
This is a guaranteed winner. If losses threaten to become too high they will fall back on the “act of God” device, that we-do-not-pay bailout of scoundrels.
Are heat waves becoming more frequent and hotter in Sydney and melbourne? Not by this 150 years of data in January.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/HEAT%20WAVES.pdf
Question why do people buy insurance
Answer , fear becasue the odds of actual needed are so high in most cases they will never claim on it. Indeed this has to be true so that insurance companies can make a profit .
In other words people have insurance not becasue of what they know will happen but becasue of what they fear may happen , so anything that increases that element is ‘good news ‘ for insurance companies. AGW as a ‘fear factor ‘ is a useful tool.
This is from the Hartford Courant, funny what Google throws up:
http://articles.courant.com/2012-12-28/news/hc-climate-change-sandy2-20121228_1_major-storms-hurricane-sandy-future-storms
“NOAA officials noted that Sandy’s arrival happened during the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature. Or as Philip Bump wrote in Grist, “if you were born in or after April 1985, if you are right now 27 years old or younger, you have never lived through a month that was colder than average.”
Kerry Emanuel, a scientist with NOAA, said that it was only in the last 10 years that meteorologists have developed a set of objective data to definitively identify hybrid storms such as Sandy. While much work has been done on looking at the frequency of conventional hurricanes, little has been done in considering whether hybrid storms are increasing either in frequency or intensity.
“What Sandy did was to remind my colleagues and I that we haven’t done our homework,” he said. “We don’t really know if they’ve increased. We don’t know. But we should be able to know.”
“There’s some projects that we’ve been mulling over,” he said. “One is to ask a hypothetical question of what would Sandy have been like hypothetically, had it occurred before this global warming?”
From a very informative piece in the Charleston Post and Courier, “Storm of Money:Hurricanes, insurance, and the secret black boxes that make our rates so high”, we learn that Dr Emanuel runs a company called WindRisk Tech LLC, http://www.windrisktech.com/, founded in 2005.
People may remember that Steve Milloy revealed Dr Emanuel’s links with the disaster insurance industry in January last year. It is with the help of modelling from companies such as his WindRiskTech that insurance companies produce the “black boxes” for setting rates, as described in the Charleston piece above.
http://junkscience.com/2012/01/06/climate-alarmist-emanuel-is-director-of-offshore-insurance-company/
The amount of CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere each year is about one percent of the total atmospheric CO2.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/research/themes/carbon/img/carboncycle.gif
I would not take the carbon budget too seriously. The alarmists give the numbers with a great deal more confidence than is warranted. Most of those numbers are based on calculations rather than direct measurement. The errors on most of them will be closer to ten percent than to one percent. It is entirely possible that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is due as much to natural causes as to anthropogenic.
We have been warming since the 1800s and the paleo record shows that CO2 in the atmosphere always goes up after the temperature goes up. The alarmists don’t have a good explanation for how that should factor into the budget.
Any business which falls for that deserves to fail. Chances are, if they don’t already have the type of insurance they’re peddling, they don’t need it. They’d be throwing their money down a rat hole.
AND, very often it is required (in actuality, often paid-for by the mortgage company directly out of the escrow account) by the mortgage company; if you want the house, you pay for the insurance (the LENDER is thereby protected against financial harm by any damage to the mortgaged property’s value) …
.
@ur momisugly Kevin (December 31, 2012 at 5:16 pm):
True enough, Kevin, but there’s also nothing in Communist theory to do with the massacre of dissidents or handing out dachas to those taking on the glorious burden of administrating the needs of the Brothers. That didn’t stop it happening though. Most political theories are sound in theory but none that I’ve encountered yet can deal (effectively) with the worse parts of human nature and some people’s desire to find an edge 😉
My main point was that in this case, as long as the company actually will pay up if your 12th floor apartment gets flooded by a tidal surge, then they really are offering a genuine product.to meet a perceived need. And it’s NOT a “need” that they’ve invented themselves. Having identified Society’s desire for such a product, of course they’re going to use anything short of outright lies to market it because that’s what most successful companies do. Personally, I run a small watch and clock repair business and I lose a lot of income (but not customers) by telling people honestly that “you don’t need that done”, while the prosperous National chains will happily sell you what you, as the customer, comes in thinking you need. They’re doing nothing “wrong”, but I choose not to operate like that because it doesn’t sit well with my principles.
The other point that I keep hoping to get across (probably in vain) is that belief or otherwise in AGW is NOT as divided by political ideology as most people characterise it. I believe that’s something that the sceptical side should be taking a lead in pointing out.
Not only is it not “Big Oil” driving scepticism, it’s not even capitalism. Any astute capitalist should be jumping up and down with glee at the opportunities created. Everything from alternative energy to extreme weather insurance to improving infrastructure against disasters offer new markets and new opportunities to give your local Ferengi Cooperative wet dreams!
In fact, I find it slightly ironic (and sad, given my personal beliefs) that the “capitalist deniers” seem to be displaying far more social conscience than the “socialist alarmists” by resisting the creation of all these unnecessary new markets.
This is what happens when Progressive zealots take over an organization. So think of how utterly asinine the hartford’s AGW policies are – well, their HR policies are every bit as bad, if not worse. Basically, the second derivative of its red tape policies follows a decree that it shall never be non-positive. The HR department has a never ending list of yearly certifications it adds to – why should one have to take a re-certification exam regarding ethics every year? There’s got to be half a dozen of these yearly requirements.
And then people wonder why in 2008 their stock price went from $52 a share down to $4 a share – these guys are basically playing the roulette wheel and the executives are taking home multimillion dollar bonuses every year, while they are cutting back on staff, reducing their bonuses, capping their salaries. FFS, when one of the executive board goes to work for the Obama admin (Wolin)….you know there’s a rat in the house…but if you happen to have a close enough look, you realize that the house is run by the rats, for the rats, at the expense of everyone else.
An old shareholder said it best at a company meeting in 07 or so…
“I want to thank you guys for taking a 200 year old company that has been part of the bedrock of the nation’s businesses…and ran it straight into the ground, taking huge bonuses for yourselves every step of the way. Bra-vo, gentleman.”
or the finance guy that stood up at a company wide meeting and said
“I know I’m probably going to lose my job for this, but are the executives in any way shape or form responsible for the disastrous results of their actions?”
Liam McGee went to BoA to disassemble it. What do you think he got brought in to the Hartford to do?
John says:
December 31, 2012 at 11:17 am
“In artical at the CBC and listed on the Tom Watsons blog there is a statement that the Kyoto protocol was suppose to reduce co2 by 5% based on 1990 levels and instead we have an increase of 58%. See the excerpt below.
“The controversial and ineffective Kyoto Protocol’s first stage comes to an end today, leaving the world with 58 per cent more greenhouse gases than in 1990, as opposed to the five per cent reduction its signatories sought.”
If the co2 level in 1990 was 353 and the current level is 392 how are they getting the percentages stated above?”
==========================================================================
Sometimes it’s hard to see, but there is an outright lie in addition to conflation of CO2 with green house gasses. Even if you take the CO2 percentage as correct at 58%, CO2 is such a small portion of the total green house gasses that there is no way that total green house gasses have risen by anywhere near that number. If I recall my Burt Rutan chart correctly, green house gasses are but 2% of the atmosphere, CO2 is 3.62% of the greenhouse gasses, and human contributed CO2 is 3.4% of CO2.
And here is the line to the chart, with all thanks to Burt for his handy speakers notes that he made available some time back.
http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.3.pdf
Facts, as was once so famously said, are stubborn things. Go find them and then beat the miscreants, liars and obsfucators around the head and shoulders with them on a regular basis.
And a very Happy New Year to all at WUWT, even joel the Troll.
Unfortunately, when things like this start to surface, then you end up with insurance backed by the government…i.e. flood insurance. Soon all insurance will fall under “extreme weather event” and insurance companies won’t pay and we’ll all have to have “extreme weather” insurance backed by the feds.
I stated this badly and it may have looked like a grenade–it was not. My remark was only meant to clarify that a 100 year event is something that has a low, but possibly constant rate of occurrence (constant if the processes behind the event are stationary) . To believe that a 100 year event somehow inoculates the world against another such event for “a long time” is false. The probability two would occur in subsequent years is the same that they would occur exactly 100 years apart. If climate is a 1/f process then there may be epochs where “100 year events” are more or less common. I’m just interested in some precision here because recurrence rates allow actuaries with some information to go about establishing premiums for such insurance, but not all. They also need premiums large enough to survive a swarm of such events