Whether you ranch, farm, or live near a beach or national forest, the Insurance companies are coming for you. Whether you live in Greece or France or Australia or Lagos, or the good old US of A, accelerating climate change is "driving an avalanche of insurance cancelations or denials " for new and existing homes and business mortgages and crop failure due to changing definitions of what is high-risk natural disasters in your region.
Insurers will not promote the fact that you will be screwed as climate impacts from our fossil fuel economy continues to wreak havoc in our cities, coasts, and farms. Insurers have moved on from covering a once-in-a- one hundred year event to a once-in-a-thousand-year disaster. This is because sapiens have failed to rein in our consumption economy, which is killing the biosphere, where disasters have changed from 100 years to every three to five years. That get's expensive, and insurers do not like to pay out damages to thousands of people for a storm or fire. They are in the insurance business to make money. Just ask a resident of Fort Myers if they have received their payout.
Lawrence Wollersheim writes in Job One for Humanity:
The old and long-used 100-year record standard that insurers commonly used for evaluating and rating weather extremes risks like heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, cyclones, rain bombs, sea level rise, flooding or erosion, wind storms [Derechos], dust storms, wildfire smoke events, unseasonable cold spells, and other abnormal unseasonal weather is no longer relevant in today's rapidly escalating global climate change emergency!
Insurance companies have repeatedly witnessed (and are tired of paying for) 100-year extreme weather now occurring every 3-5 years or less.
In addition to paying for many more climate-related losses, it did not take long for the world's insurance companies to also notice that the records for extreme weather of all kinds were not broken by very small amounts as in the past. It has now become clear to them that new records for extreme weather of all kinds are happening by larger and larger percentages. As a result of this and several other factors below, the world's best insurance companies are scrambling to reevaluate and recalculate their policy portfolios and acceptance policies.
They are also beginning to use uncensored climate change consequence predictions and timeframes from private sector climate risk analysis firms and not the grossly underestimated public data summary reports of the governments or the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Insurance companies are now also developing and using new 1,000-year record standards for heatwaves, rain, drought, winds, flooding wildfires, and all other kinds of extreme and unseasonable weather, which, unfortunately, will become the new normal in the future.
Insurance companies are now forced to use 1,000-year record standards for extreme weather risks because climate change has worsened so much that the old hundred-year standards are entirely inadequate for determining current risk levels. Additionally, because of accelerating climate change, 100-year extreme weather record events are occurring as often as every 3 to 5 years instead of about once every hundred years. Some climate scientists predict that even the new 1,000-year insurance standards will soon be obsolete because we will soon be facing climate change-driven consequences and conditions that have not occurred for hundreds of thousands of years.
The better-run worldwide insurance companies' most competent climate risk analysts now also know that the severity, frequency, and size of areas affected by climate change consequences will increase radically between 2025 and 2031. Moreover, they also know that after 2031, if our governments fail to act effectively before 2025, the severity, frequency, and size of areas affected by intensifying climate change consequences will increase exponentially!
Citizens, deniers, and enablers may not be taking the facts and the climate emergency seriously, but the insurance industry is taking note. They know that Atlantic basin wind storms are no longer the quaint storms we knew to be fast-moving compact storms (such as Andrew or Charlie). The storms we have experienced recently are significantly more extensive in size and more powerful, including jaw-dropping amounts of rainfall that stall and hammer the unfortunate for days on end. The same can be said of wildfires, floods, and droughts, the climate is breaking down, and we are only at the beginning of the collapse.
Climate scientists are no longer being ignored within the industry. When these scientists predict hundreds of trillions of dollars in consequences worldwide, State Farm will sit up and take notice. They know that the IPCC reports are direr and more extensive than they claim. Science is not boring to them; it is a wake-up call, and politicians and the fossil fuel industry's rosy outlooks will not sway them.
As a result, insurers have stopped or will stop writing policies in the 1000-year danger zones. With a renewal policy, insurers have made total exemption clauses in these zones. Once the thousand-year events become more and more common, "these new climate change consequence-related exemptions specifically deny all climate change-related damages related to ALL extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, cyclones, rain bombs, sea level rise, flooding or erosion, wind storms [Derechos], dust storms, wildfire smoke events, unseasonable cold spells, and other abnormal unseasonal weather. "
Borrowing more from Job one for Humanity on the writing of exemptions:
a. any unexpected extreme weather event is exempted from coverage that has not occurred over the last 100 years.
b. any extreme weather event is excluded from coverage that breaks the previous 100-year event record by 3-5% or more.
3. They are setting new or renewal policy rates so high that no typical homeowner, business owner, or home buyer farmer could ever afford them.
The article is lengthy, but so much more information is available there.
I have yet another doctor's appointment. I will be back soon with antibiotics.