Insurance companies have a love/hate relationship with losses. They are obviously inconvenient for the current bottom-line but useful ammunition for boosting future business and raising premiums. The invented climate crisis scare is a fantastic marketing promotion, and the world’s largest reinsurance company Munich Re is all in on these opportunities. It has announced a “heavy-loss” year for natural disasters in 2024, “where the destructive forces of climate change are becoming increasingly evident”. The distinguished science writer Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has examined the weather figures and reports that overall losses, usually around twice the insured total, were about 0.26% of global GDP, similar to 2021 and 2022, much lower than 2005 and 2017, and higher than 2018 and 2023. Since 1990, observes Pielke, the overall trend is down – from about 0.25% of GDP to around 0.20% in 2024. Catastrophe losses, which most affect reinsurers like Munich Re which cover large risks from primary insurers (think bookies laying off their larger bets), were regularly much higher as a proportion of GDP in the 1990s than in 2024.
Happily climate change, which Munich Re says is “showing its claws”, will not unduly inconvenience its shareholders. A handsome 2024 profit of around €5 billion is expected. Last year also saw reality trump virtue-signalling with Munich Re leaving the Green Blob-inspired Net Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA). Once reality set in, the obvious anti-trust implications hit home and the attempt to enforce collective decarbonisation through insurance underwriting was dropped like a stone. “It is more effective to pursue our climate ambition to reduce global warming individually,” said the founding member of NZIA. It is of course reassuring to know that Munich Re is on the job of stopping the movement of global temperatures, but surely it should have occurred to it to run the NZIA past a few lawyers before joined it only to suffer a humiliating departure.
However, climate change fear mongering is far too good a marketing tool to be cancelled. “One record breaking high after another – the consequence are devastating. The destructive forces of climate change are becoming increasingly evident as backed up by the science”, claims Munich Re. Societies need to prepare for more severe weather catastrophes,” it adds. It is not clear which severe weather catastrophes are getting worse since a great deal of evidence including some provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggests otherwise. But no doubt cover, at a suitable climate change-adjusted price, can be arranged to assuage the fears of a concerned public.
Back in the real world, the Munich Re suggestion that climate change is “taking the gloves off” is not borne out by the data.
Dr. Pielke makes the obvious point that the data in the above graph is good news. In terms of expected economic losses, extreme weather has less of an impact today than it did 35 years ago, a fact that is curiously missing from almost all mainstream media. Munich Re’s commercial commentary is replicated countless times with misleading reports that humans are causing more extreme weather events. Much of this is whipped up by pseudoscience computer models making improbable and unprovable attribution claims.
All of this is not to say that losses will not trend higher in the future given the growth in exposure values fuelled by factors such as construction in high-hazard locations and rising replacement costs. Verisk is a leading analyst of insurance risk and its president Bill Churney emphasises these factors “exert a more immediate impact”. Piekle notes what Churney says and adds the view of the world’s second largest reinsurer Swiss Re that it has not yet seen a signal of climate change in losses. “To date, growth in natural catastrophe-related property losses has been mostly driven by rising exposures due to economic growth, accumulation of asset values, urbanisation and rising populations, often in regions susceptible to severe weather events (e.g. coastal regions, river fronts, and wildland-urban interfaces),” it says.
Dr. Pielke notes that it is perfectly reasonable to ask if changes in climate as reflected in the statistics of extreme weather events play some role in increasing catastrophe losses. For its part, Munich Re expects forthcoming profits of more than €5 billion and even great returns of €6 billion in 2025. “After climate change has taken off its gloves, it turns out that its claws are not really that sharp,” Pielke concludes.
Some readers will no doubt have seen the article written by Lionel Shriver in last week’s U.K. Spectator magazine titled, ‘The case against a “climate emergency”‘. It is an excellent ‘cut-out-and keep’ guide to climate scepticism and a useful antidote for those who still believe in climate Armageddon. She starts by stating that she is “increasingly convinced” the ‘climate emergency’ is another social mania we’ll look back on with a “J-eez, what was that about? Why?” She makes many debunking statements, many of which will be familiar to regular readers of the Daily Sceptic and other publications that question the so-called settled narrative. Climate propogandists lie, she states, writing:
They take temperature readings at Heathrow airport. They refuse to cite less distressing satellite readings. They attribute single weather events to climate change without supporting data. They play on the fact that up close, all natural disasters seem like the worst ever. They suppress good news, such as the recovery of the Great Barrier Reef and the fact that hurricanes have not grown more frequent – only reporting the ’hottest July on record’ without noting when the ‘record’ goes back only to 1940.
Shriver’s views are becoming more mainstream by the day – Michael Gove, one time friend-of-Greta and Government Minister, now Spectator Editor, describes his columnist’s piece as “a persuasive case for why the ‘climate emergency’ might be just another social mania”. But until wider society wakes up to the scale of the con trick that is being pulled to promote the Net Zero fantasy, it’s still ‘Treble Premiums all Round’.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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