It’s getting hotter
5 years, 3 months, 2 days, 20 hours
19 April 2024
A graph that instantly conveys a stark truth. Are you feeling the heat yet?
I wonder how many of you had a Spirograph set? Perhaps still do in a cupboard somewhere. Apparently it was Toy of the Year in 1967 and in the finals again in 2014. Now a confession. Not only do I have a set in a cupboard I also have a motor-powered Meccano version gathering dust, that was built…well let’s just say at some point since my childhood. Then in February I was at the remarkable if self-indulgent MONA art museum in Hobart, Tasmania, and stumbled across a piece of installation-art that was a spirograph driven by the vagaries of wind on an anemometer. I am telling you all this because those spirograph images flooded my mind when I saw today this beautiful graphic, that instantly conveys a stark truth:
The graphic is from a brilliant report stuffed with many other visually-compelling charts and tables published by Swiss Re in February. The summary is here: Changing climates: the heat is (still) on together with a link to download the full report. It analyses and summarises the spatial distribution of climate-related risks across 36 countries and observes that many of the countries with the greatest exposure have the lowest levels of insurance, notably the Philippines and India - but even the US is considered under-covered. I have copied below two further charts from the same report that tell this story.
In 2022, according to AON, global economic losses from climate events totalled $313 billion, of which $132 billion was covered by insurance. That compares to weather-related insurance losses for the DECADE from 2007 to 2017 of $210 billion, which itself represented a doubling of losses for climate events over the previous decade. So on an annualised basis insured losses have increased around 10 fold in the last 25 years. And, according to The Economist this week, extrapolating from MSCI data, the world faces a potential $25 trillion cost to property owners over the next 25 years from a combination of climate-related property damage and investments required of them by governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Are you feeling the heat yet?
