Bermuda Risk Summit receives sombre message on climate change
Humans have built a world for a climate that no longer exists, a climate change journalist and author has told the Bermuda Risk Summit, taking place in Bermuda this week.
Jeff Goodell (pictured) delivered a sombre message to the re/insurers gathered at the Hamilton Princess & Beach Club yesterday, saying it could take hundreds or thousands of years to clear carbon from the atmosphere.
He said 2023 and 2024 were the hottest years on record, with temperatures increasing by more than 1.5 degrees Centigrade – the limit placed in the Paris Accords in 2015.
What was most concerning was that the spike in temperatures had not been modelled, and scientists did not know what caused it.
Goodell, the bestselling author of The Heat Will Kill You First and The Water Will Come, said it was true that the planet had experienced climate changes before, but he said that all of those changes came before human civilisation began 8 to 10,000 years ago.
“We have had a very stable climate in this very narrow band,” he said, adding that the current unprecedented increase in temperatures was largely caused by burning fossil fuels.
He noted that some cities and countries were adapting to climate change, but the scale of the change was massive.
“It took 8,000 years to build a civilisation for one climate, now we have to retool,” he said. “But we don’t even know what that might look like.”
Goodell said climate change was not linear, citing the sudden spike in temperatures in 2023 and 2024. Another example was the way hurricanes were showing up in different places and intensifying faster.
Turning to the Los Angeles wildfires, he said the fact there was a drought in Southern California in January, coinciding with the Santa Ana winds, turning it into a firestorm, was worrying and unprecedented.
He said the other concern was that physics was not the only cause of climate change – human decisions were dangerous as well.
This included the Trump Administration’s job cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would affect storm warning systems and would reduce preparedness.
“Zeitgeist shifts with the Trump Administration is not good news for tackling climate change,” he said.
Goodell said there were several questions facing the insurance industry.
One was whether climate risks would continue to accelerate in unforeseen ways and if they could be modelled. “The world is complicated, and we are messing with the world in ways we do not really understand,” he said.
Another was whether a company’s chief executive officer had the courage and leadership to see opportunity in disruption. “A CEO should deal with it by managing the business with a deep understanding of how much things are changing.”
“How will legal liability for climate damages evolve,” he went on to ask. “The question of accountability could change quite quickly.”
He questioned whether climate change would have an existential effect on the insurance industry.
“A world of two degrees of warming is insurable,” he said. “At four degrees it is not. A big challenge to you as you try to grapple with this is how do you integrate it into your business? This is a really serious question.”
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