“Especially storms of previously unobserved strength.” So Stefan Rahmstorf, Kerry Emanuel, Mike Mann and Jim Kossin write, drawing on their own work and synthesising that of other researchers. This is very bad news for the insurance industry, and indeed all who live in cyclone belt.
I recall back in 1993, when I first started working on the impact of climate change on the insurance industry, being educated by Andrew Dlugolecki of General Accident an how ruinous the non linear damage function would be with rising intensity (i.e. intensity may rise linearly, but damage will rise extremely non-linearly). As described in some detail in The Carbon War.
Image: from report – Percentage increase 1980 to 2016 (as a linear trend) in the number of tropical storms worldwide depending on their strength. Only 95% significant trends are shown. The strongest storms are also increasing the most. Red colors show the hurricane category on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Graph by Kerry Emanuel, MIT. Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 3.0.
