A Bloomberg News story today titled “Why Snow, Hail, and Wildfire Are Expensive for Insurance Industry” chalks up massive insurance losses this year to climate change.

“Climate change is exacerbating extreme and freak weather events so rapidly that even the insurance industry is struggling to keep up,” the story says.

“Late last week,” it continues, “reinsurance giant Swiss Re AG released its mid-year insurance losses and the figures were the second-highest on record. Insurers had to cover $40 billion in losses caused by natural catastrophes. The previous ten-year average for the first half of the year is $33 billion.”

“[T]he safest bet when the climate’s changing is that weird things are going to happen a lot more. Severe weather including hail and tornados in Central Europe in June accounted for about $4.5 billion in losses and have been linked to climate change,” Bloomberg says. “… Swiss Re thinks that this type of event is a trend they need to get on top of.”

The reality is that there is no upward trend in “freak weather events” like heat waves, cold snaps, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, or wildfires (which aren’t so much weather events, since, as the article acknowledges, 90 percent of ignitions are by human action, and their intensity depends primarily on forest management, not weather), and it is impossible to blame any given extreme weather event, or any given percentage of its severity, on global warming.

But the insurance industry—and especially the reinsurance industry (the handful of giant firms that insures insurance companies)—have a vested interest in your thinking climate change is driving increased losses. That belief makes you willing to pay higher premiums—increasing the already high profit margins of the industry.

Photo by Malachi Brooks on Unsplash.