Climate Change, Insurance, and the LA Fires
28th January 2025
Scientific American blames the Los Angeles fires on climate change. A Yale University publication agrees. An article in Quartz predicts that climate change is going to make housing “uninsurable.” Instead of insurance, a New York Times op-ed by a former California insurance commissioner argues that oil companies should be forced to pay for fire damages.
It’s a neat argument that appeals to homeowners eager to blame the loss of their houses on anything other than their own decisions to buy or build flammable homes with flammable landscaping in a fireplain. Yet there are valid reasons to believe that climate change is not the issue, and that even if climate change is occurring, it won’t make homes uninsurable. In fact, people who believe climate change is the problem should be all the more interested in making sure that homes and landscaping are fireproof.
A key weakness in most of the arguments for anthropogenic climate change is that they rely on data that goes back only about 55 years or so. The 1970s were one of the coolest decades in the 20th century, so any data that start from there will make it appear that temperatures are rising. The Yale article cites one study that uses data back to 1971 and another that goes back to just 2001.