Extreme weather caused more than $100B in damage by June
livescience.com91 points by geox 12 hours ago
91 points by geox 12 hours ago
1. They are calling a wildfire an "extreme weather event" which is dubious as weather is only a contributing factor here
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
That's not what the insurance industry is saying.
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...
The comment above you was not denying that climate change exists. It was criticizing a misleading title. The insurance industry would absolutely say that the California wildfires were an outlier event, even if there is a trend of increased damage overall.
Both things can be true.
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)
More people living in high risk areas + big increases in costs for building supplies and labor + higher building code standards for new construction + higher costs for planning and permitting all also contribute to rising insurance premiums or insurers just deciding to leave an area.
They aren't offering coverage because the state is disallowing premium increases.
It's a government caused shortage via price fixing.
Government policy has significant impacts on the probability of total loss events, such as wildfire or flooding.
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.
I trade this risk for a living. I price for risk and that risk is real. It really doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s in the loss data and it is trending up.
They're not denying the existence of the risk, they're pointing out that a significant portion of the risk is specific policy decisions by the current administration.
Climate science does itself a disservice by being so imprecise and not controlling for unrelated variables. And yet your comment is flagged, and probably will be removed.
It's imprecise because modeling the whole climate is a humongous task.
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.
The big challenge/mistake of "science" over the years has been trying to prove slow-moving, gradual influences by pointing to extreme - often outlier - events. If you say it was a super hot summer because of climate change you inevitably open yourself to the rebuttal "but the winter before had the coldest January in 50 years!"-type of response. Combined with decades of perpetual doom & gloom and a proposed solution that depends on major immediate sacrifice and trust in politicians that the pay-off will come to your grandkids - is there any surprise we've not made any progress? Fighting climate change has a major positioning and marketing problem.
> If you say it was a super hot summer because of climate change
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."
Who are these "well-meaning" news outlets you describe? I certainly haven't run into them.
I'm sure, then, that you must you have some alternate means of keeping abreast of current events so that your public discourse is grounded in a shared understanding of objective reality. Care to share what those are?
I don't. I just use the clickbait whores because that's all I've got.
https://apnews.com/ is a good place to start. In the meantime, perhaps you should refrain from opinionated commenting on current events if your opinion is self-admittedly derived from "clickbait whores".
What's also often omitted is population growth resulting in more / larger buildings being built in any given place, so the same event in the same area from 50 years ago would result in much more damage in $ today.
> weather is only a contributing factor here
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.
>> wildfires become a certainty.
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...
> The fire appears started by an arsonist
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).
Wasn’t the LA fire caused by an arsonist? He was the main factor.
If it was cold and raining, the fire wouldn't spread.
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.
In a legal sense probably, but in a statistical cost sense you’re estimating whether the same arson would have spread to the same extent in a pre-industrial climate.
Even in tropical climates with wet rainy season you can have forest fires now and centuries ago. If people set fire to things fire will happen.
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.
Most fires aren't arson, but instead downed power lines.
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.
>> Most fires aren't arson, but instead downed power lines.
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.
I can't tell you about Canada, but in the US we compile statistics around it.
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.
Even if so, that's a rather unsatisfying explanation, isn't it?
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?
Explanations have no obligation to be satisfying (and the more satisfying an explanation is, the more you should question its accuracy). This is a great illustration of the problem. As the population of LA increases:
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.
If the accidents were caused by a bad OTA update or caused by a hacker… that’s different from the normal course of things.
Sure, in the same way that the main factor of car accidents is people getting in cars. If people would just stop getting in cars, we would hardly have any car accidents.
> They are calling a wildfire an "extreme weather event"
If one ignore the winds, and the californian drought, then sure.
In fairness, the winds and droughts have been a documented feature of that area for thousands of years and for as long as Europeans have been there. While it may be extreme, it is also normal for that region.
There is nothing “extreme” about those things in Southern California. Those factors have existed as long as there have been people there, and neither condition this year was a statistical outlier.
We play a dangerous game with science communication. When it was just "global warming" it almost worked to scare the public into behaving but then people went "yeah but look, it's cold outside". There are still a lot of people who view climate change (and really that's a very soft term, doesn't convey urgency) as a waste of money. By showing how much it costs they can try to mitigate that. But, as you point out, your numbers need to be bulletproof. Otherwise those climate deniers will go "but inflation"
Look at the term you used when you discuss science communication:
> 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.
If homo sapiens is to survive, we had better have the capacity to see the truth even if sometimes the messenger of that truth falls to human faults, like exaggeration or even straight lies.
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're not homo sapiens at this point. We're homo consumens. We're addicted to the thing that drives climate change.
We might be able to stop it if we killed advertising. And social media.
The International Panel on Climate Change was started in 1988. We've been calling it climate change since before most people heard of global warming.
Deniers will complain about any name you give it.
Some "deniers" aren't "deniers". They're tired of the scare tactic headlines, politics, and fatalistic language.
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.
The past 20 years have proven out pretty basic math: when you multiply a bimodal distribution by a constant > 1 you still have two modes but the peaks are farther apart. The deviation is that in our case the peaks are actually higher than before.
They aren't potential allies. They are fully entrenched, and I won't be gaslit into pretending that's my fault. Not will I waste time on the lie that they'll come around if only I suck up to them. I will call them the name they have earned.
This is the same problem the Democratic party has when some fringe members of the party essentially say, "fuck you, vote for me." It poisons the well.
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.
One side has to argue in good faith and be correct 100% of the time, while the other side can lie with impunity. Is it any surprise who wins the debate?
Nobody is 100% right or 100% wrong. There is no "side" that talks about the size of the world population, and the fact that the scientific advances are the reason for the ability of entire human race to exhaust available resources. There is also no "side" that ranks the global climate change truly globally, and focuses on top priorities. There are no global "sides". There are only people. People do care, but people also don't want to make hard choices. Finger pointing is just too easy.
There absolutely are sides in an argument however, which is what they are talking about.
I don't believe any climate change "skeptic" has ever been swayed by "bulletproof" numbers and arguments. Well, not for the last fifty years at least. This disbelief in a fundamental truth of our times wasn't birthed in rationality and won't be cured by it.
Those California Wildfires were difficult to control due to the extreme wind. Weather was a direct cause of well over 95% of the damages.
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.
Weather seems to be an increasingly contributing factor, though: https://cpo.noaa.gov/study-shows-that-climate-change-is-the-...
At the time, every politician including California Governor Gavin Newsom jumped on the "it's clearly climate change" bandwagon.
It turns out it was good old fashioned arson[1].
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-08/palisade...
A small bush fire is not supposed to cause 60 billion in damage. Also, innocent until proven guilty. The evidence against the guy seems weak… like generating images on ChatGPT
A significant amount of that damage was due to government policy, or rather failures of government policy.
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.
Arson and the heavy and warm Santa Ana winds which is climate related
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
FTA:
> 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...
Yes, and my main point that LA always has multiple not fully extinguished flames
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
Again, FTA:
> 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.
I'm very familiar with the post-mortem, most of this was available since March
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.
This dataset https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/time-series does not cover every extreme weather event, just large ones, but it is at least adjusted to CPI.
Also it’s not getting updated anymore because usgov is currently in ostrich mode when it comes to climate change.
I watched this Dutch documentary series (Planet Finance by VPRO) and one of the episodes covered a thing called Catastrophe Bonds (CAT Bonds):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEwYDl5tl-s&list=PLuECoz9_QT...
There is a good write up in the Chicago Fed about them and how they work
https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2...
And the FT did a recent piece on it too: https://www.ft.com/video/b3e44987-107d-49cd-b2b4-397a10bc3af...
I expect that this will become more common in the future.
oh yeah and there is also Weather derivative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_derivative
But heaven help us if we spend a tiny fraction of the money we spend on automobiles on bicycle infrastructure.
A 560-Year Record of Santa Ana Fires Reconstructed from Charcoal Deposited in the Santa Barbara Basin, California
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00335...
I'm currently trying to decide what to replace my roof with. From the bids I've gotten, a metal roof is looking to be 3x more expensive than asphalt shingles. I could use that money for lots of other projects to make my house nicer and more energy efficient.
But I can't shake the feeling that I'd be glad to have metal for some future tornado, derecho, or wildfire hitting my area. My area isn't facing insurance companies pulling out yet, but the future feels less optimistic every year.
In the US...
So let me get this straight: 70% of that number is caused by a wildfire for which the alleged arsonist is currently awaiting trial (and on record saying he did start the fire).
Thank you very much for being so open and transparent with your headline. It’s not like I expected some number shenanigans reading it.
Anthropogenic climate change is the most pressing issue humanity faces. Yet the best minds of our generation our focused on creating AI models to plagiarize human expression.
The world deserves better then the onslaught of ad powered content that technology has enabled the proliferation of.
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