Received our flood insurance premium notice yesterday.

$930.

I think that's about $130 more than last year.

But it's probably still a bargain.

I'm not tempted at all to skip it this year. All anyone has to do is watch the news. We are living in a climate that has never existed before on this planet.

Yes, the present CO2 concentration has existed in earth's atmosphere before, but not with these polar ice caps. Not with this human imprint on the landscape.

I don't know if climate models can be used to accurately calculate risk. We're seeing these extreme rainfall events that aren't necessarily incompatible with current climate models. But I don't know that any of them, or any climatologist for that matter, has predicted them. Yes, "more intense," but now much "more"? I think what we're experiencing in these extreme rainfall events is beyond anyone's expectation.

We used to calculate risk by relying on statistics from historical data. Historical data is meaningless now. That climate no longer exists. And we're still changing the composition of the atmosphere that determines our climate. That is to say, we are in a dynamic transient and there is no way to use history and statistics to anticipate the likelihood of some future event, because these future events will occur in a climate that has never existed before.

I know I'm repeating myself, but I don't think anyone's gotten the message.

We could have anticipated that we'd find ourselves in this situation, and we might have made some decisions regarding development to at least mitigate the risk from that dimension.

But, no. We didn't do anything to arrest the emissions of CO2. We didn't do anything to direct development to less risky areas. Worst of all possible worlds.

Stupefying.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:49 Friday, 9 August 2024