2. Of that $100 billion, $60 billion is from the LA wildfire, so this number is extremely outlier driven
3. There are no inflation adjustments or tests of statistical significance in their claims that damage from extreme weather is rapidly increasing over time
There's an increasing number of locations where extreme weather losses are statistically inevitable, and insurers are no longer offering coverage.
https://earth.org/financial-storm-how-escalating-climate-eve...
1/ totally misleading title
2/ the fires in CA drive the outlier
3/ insurance has already largely pulled out of los angeles. For example there are maybe 2 reliable insurers for 2-4 unit landlords in the fourth largest economy in the world (why discuss landlord insurance? same style of building but a higher duty of care)
It's a government caused shortage via price fixing.
Climate change is a really good excuse for insurance companies to raise premiums... people just shrug their shoulders and say "what are you gonna do?", then pay the new premiums.
Some of what insurance companies say may be true, but quite a bit of it is not. Funny how we don't believe health insurance companies but we'll take property insurance companies for their word.
Governments control budgeting and staffing for first responder units, they control training budgets, they control responses. While climate change may be impacting some of these events, they should never spiral into massive total loss events like as-of late.
A friend's whole PhD as a physicist was to improve modeling cloud formation at a molecular level to be used in a model which was then part of an ensemble, that took him 5-6 years to manage to improve one particular parameter of a model with thousands of parameters.
It's an attempt to simulate all the energy transfers happening from solar activity on Earth's atmosphere, through all chemistry and biological reactions that contribute to results.
If one ignore the winds, and the californian drought, then sure.
Real scientists don't say that. They always say something like, "This [hurricane/heat wave/whatever] is an example of what climate models predict will be increasingly common."
It's individuals who don't understand the difference between climate and weather that draw those conclusions, and well-meaning news outlets do it a lot too.
It's still fair to say, "Hey, you know this extreme weather we've been having for the last few years? Whether it's caused by climate change now or not, it will be the norm by the time your grandkids are in college."
That's just how things are. If we depend on the side that warns us of climate change to never make a mistake or an intentional wrong, we're cooked. Because that side is human as are all sides of all arguments.
Maybe we are cooked. That's how it looks to this clueless person.
We might be able to stop it if we killed advertising. And social media.
> it almost worked to scare the public into behaving
That obviously isn't the point of science, and when you make it the point of science, people quite rationally stop trusting it.
Deniers will complain about any name you give it.
When you call them "deniers", you push them even further away. You've gone from being mildly annoying to name-calling.
This applies to other subjects as well - masks, LGBT politics, social equality, etc.
Name-calling turns potential allies into entrenched enemies, yet some proponents for change double down on this tactic which further erodes their goal of winning people to their side.
It doesn't matter that the well-meaning people within the party are always on their best behavior and are making every attempt to be inclusive. A few bad eggs ruins the perception of the entire batch.
This is militant and excludes people. It's also really self-serving. You get to feel good about yourself while simultaneously pushing people away.
This is a massive problem with social media.
And yet they are still more likely allies than Republican "centrists". They just voted for a felon and an insurrectionist. They knew that he was incompetent, stupid, and deliberately hostile. They voted for him because he's not the Democrat.
I will not be able to change their minds. Any candidate I vote for will always be their enemy. They're not just waiting for a kind word from me to put that hostility behind them and be nice centrist friends.
The Democratic party still has not accepted that. And they will continue to lose.
Inflation isn’t enough to actually measure what you care about here. A paper should account for individual homes increasing in value faster than inflation and the overall population increase.
Without that it’s far better to just convey the raw numbers and link to an more in depth analysis.
If it gets dry, hot, and windy enough, wildfires become a certainty. That's like saying rain is only a contributing factor for flooding.
Anyway, the thing that made all the numbers in LA wasn't the wildfires. When a city burns, it's not wildfire.
This is wrong as a stand-alone statement, and specifically in this case. The fire appears started by an arsonist, and the dry, hot wind was "a contributing factor" in making it much worse.
>> That's like saying rain is only a contributing factor for flooding
There are lots of places where abnormal amounts of rain don't cause flooding. Very important: geography, flood mitigation, environment & ecology, emergency response...
There were plenty of wildfires on the region last year. And that one you are talking about wasn't a wildfire.
> There are lots of places where abnormal amounts of rain don't cause flooding.
Yes, and we still say that rain causes flooding. Just like it's perfectly fine to say the weather causes wildfires.
That doesn't mean it can't be controlled. And it doesn't also mean we can control extreme events (we can't, in either case).
If the city wasn't made in a way that spreads fire, the fire wouldn't spread.
If the arsonist wasn't there, the odds that some wildfire could start a city fire were still good. They always get plenty of those.
Those are all contributing factors, and acting upon them will give you differing (but composing) kinds of resiliency. There is one that people can change and makes city fires basically impossible; it's not the one on the news.
That’s a separate issue from climate change. Climate change can increase or decrease propensity of climate related phenomena compared to a reference point.
Does climate suppress or exacerbate climate related phenomena? Yes. Still this was a fire set by someone. Like you know the Chicago fire happened.
But even that isn't a good measure of people setting fires because humans put out so many fires of all different causes it's nearly impossible to figure out what the pre and post human era damage would be.
For example if we put out 10 dry lightning caused fires when they are a few acres in size was that more or less than would have happened prehistorically. Nearly impossible to tell.
What we can tell is the number of fires of all causes, natural or human is rapidly accelerating in the past few decades and the fires are burning faster, hotter, and longer than in previous record keeping.
Is this true? maybe for specific regions, or compared to say arson, but Canada has thousands of forest fires every year and the vast majority are lightning strikes. We also don't put usually them out, so I don't think that's a great measure. The thing that's changed in the US and Canada is how much prevention and suppression we do. You'd expect this to result in fewer fires but bigger outliers, at least near people.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/wildfire-causes-and-evaluation....
>Nearly 85 percent* of wildland fires in the United States are caused by humans. Human-caused fires result from campfires left unattended, the burning of debris, equipment use and malfunctions, negligently discarded cigarettes, and intentional acts of arson.
*Source: 2000-2017 data based on Wildland Fire Management Information (WFMI) and U.S. Forest Service Research Data Archive
Note that conditions like powerline failures are considered human caused in the above information.
It would be like trying to explain an increase in automotive fatalities by attributing the problem to all those people getting in accidents.
As the world's population grows, would you expect the threat of individual arsonists to decrease, or increase? What's the root cause on that?
1. The number of arsonists will increase
2. The probability of a given lightning strike causing a house fire will increase (as the built up area increases)
3. The probability that a wildfire in an unpopulated area will spread to a populated area will increase
4. The potential number of houses destroyed by a single fire increases
5. The dollar value per house destroyed increases
So if there were no change at all in the weather patterns, we would still expect to see an increase in fire damage over time when the population of LA increases. That's why you can't just scream "it's global warming!" when the chart goes up and to the right and weather is a contributing factor.
Also it’s not getting updated anymore because usgov is currently in ostrich mode when it comes to climate change.
It turns out it was good old fashioned arson[1].
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-08/palisade...
Fire hydrants literally went dry in the middle of firefighting. Fire Departments were critically understaffed, and were using critically outdated dispatching systems that didn't share information or communication effectively.
The fire was started by arson, and it ravaged the city due to government failures.
LA was experience hurricane force 80 mph winds, which were its own issue
LA always has small smoldering fires from arson and other sources
With that baseline then it’s still climate related, leaving us to evaluate if that particular weather event was part of any change or has its own prior frequency and intensity.
It also reveals how vulnerable the area is to climate change either way
> Los Angeles fire officials, already under scrutiny for their failure to pre-deploy engines to the Palisades fire, are now facing questions about why they didn’t fully extinguish the flames from the initial fire before hurricane-force winds blew into the area and fanned an ember buried within the roots of dense vegetation.
Multiple, stacking governmental failures are to blame for the breadth of destruction here.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-08/palisade...
Highlighting the vulnerability to climate change
Right now, that’s just government officials trying to cover their ass with finger pointing in the face of standard operating procedure, either way incompetence needs to be rooted out and the procedure needs to be changed, recognizing the changing climate environment
> A Times investigation found that LAFD officials did not pre-deploy any engines to the Palisades ahead of the Jan. 7 fire, despite warnings about extreme weather. In preparing for the winds, the department staffed up only five of more than 40 engines available to supplement the regular firefighting force.
> Those engines could have been pre-positioned in the Palisades and elsewhere, as had been done in the past during similar weather.
This was governmental failure at large. Not climate change. Extreme weather happens, and we (citizens) expect our government to prepare accordingly. It's literally their job to prepare for this sort of catastrophe.
> Right now, that’s just government officials trying to cover their ass with finger pointing
You are right - with finger pointing at climate change, throwing their hands up in the air while saying "what are you gonna do, it's extreme weather!". The weather was predictable and was predicted - and the government failed to plan accordingly. The government systematically underfunded, under-trained, and under utilized it's emergency resources. There's very little excuse here.
Since you like to quote things that are unrelated to the prior things you quoted, let's continue listing them:
The reservoir for the palisades wasn't filled due to a different form of incompetence, so even if the firefighters were there they would run out of water
The pump system in the palisades didn't have enough pressure for large scale use, multiple fire hydrants would have resulted in the same lack of water
Now let's go back to what was mentioned earlier, and the thing we actually agree on, the standard operating procedure needs to change - and here is where we disagree: with urgency due to the likelihood of weather events.
This whole thread I specifically avoided saying "its due to climate change" selecting words to avoid your deflections, and yet your whole identity is based on making sure nobody even discusses the possibility it might be.
There are also smouldering fires in LA quite often. The way LAFD deals with them needs to change.... due to the likelihood of weather events. The palisades fire smouldering would have been fine without the hurricane force winds, but it wasn't, and we always have smouldering fires left alone by LAFD once they get to that state.
> The pump system in the palisades didn't have enough pressure for large scale use, multiple fire hydrants would have resulted in the same lack of water
You cite even more governmental failures, then somehow still claim "due to climate change" policy needs to change. Weather events didn't create this fire - a human did, and governmental failures stacked to turn it into a disaster. Somehow your take-away is "climate change" nonetheless...
LA with high warm winds at hurricane level strength: incompetent government and smouldering fires everywhere that destroy entire neighborhoods
ok.