“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
―Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Thirty-three out there this morning, not so cold but a raw one all the same. I shooed Peg out the door with her coffee about an hour-and-a-half ago, then crawled back into bed to read the paper on my tablet until sliding back into about forty-five minutes of blessed slumber. Not fair I know, but after a night tossing and turning, without my usual sleep aid during this Dry January, I spent 1:30 to 4:30 solving the world's problems in my head before a nap that lasted only until the alarm went off at 5:30. P's gentle snoring, barely audible above Dean the Cat's, tells me she didn't battle the same insomnia.
Looking out the front, there's still no snow on the hills and it's the third of January.
Yes, that's a Buffalo Bills flag drooping from our flagpole on the front porch. They're playing the hated Dolphins for the AFC East title Sunday night, which is a pleasant surprise given how poorly they've played this season.
This lack of snow, so late in the winter, is the subject of much conversation and conjecture up here. Bristol Mountain can't draw snow skiers because there's nothing on which to ski. The Christmas festivals all around here took place mostly in drizzle, without the usual mantle of white blanketing everything by mid-December. Kate came up for four days right after Christmas, and the only snow she saw consisted of a few errant flakes in the predawn darkness driving to the airport for the flight home.
And it's not just us. Others in these latitudes across the U.S. have lamented the brown Christmas.
While across the pond in Holland, warm temperatures mean no ice, and no ice means their annual cross-country skating race, the Elfstedentocht, isn't just postponed--it's dead.
Whole ways of life gone, or altered beyond recognition. Earth will be just fine, of course, but those of us who are on it and of it may have a tough row to hoe.
But the epicenter of climate-driven mayhem in the U.S. is, of course, our home in Florida. And the folks who flocked there in search of "freedom", with an overrepresentation of climate change deniers, who scooped up their life's savings in Peoria and bought that little dream home on a canal, are getting a rude shock as the insurance markets begin to charge the actual value of the risk.
The WaPo is indignant that the new players are "cherry-picking" lower risk policies out of the risk pool of Citizens Insurance, the state-run property insurer of last resort, and that slick insurance entrepreneurs are making bank by raking in premiums and not paying claims, using the funds instead to pay legislators to gut what few protections Florida law until recently extended to its residents. And yes, all that is pretty vulgar, and part of a larger trend of insurance companies trying to buy friends rather than fairly treat their loyal customers---one can't watch the "Allstate Sugar Bowl" or the "Rose Bowl, Presented by Prudential", with ads every seven minutes featuring Mahomes and Kelce hawking the products of the "Good Neighbor", and not wonder a little where they're getting the bags of cash it takes to buy all that exposure.
Florida's toxic political culture, a fetid mix of amped up Southern boosterism and single-party rule by a particularly authoritarian branch of the Grand Old Party, provides the perfect petri dish for this sort of miasmic flora. The insurance industry actually bought a dramatic change in the law, under the guise of "tort reform", that gutted the rights of insureds who were bullied and sought relief in court. Until nine months ago, an insurer that failed to fairly adjust and pay a claim faced an award not only of the amount it should have paid, but also the insured's attorneys' fees incurred in the exercise. tort reform did away with all that. Now, with contingent fee contracts typically hovering around 40% of any recovery, an insurer can with a straight face offer a third less than what it actually owes its insured presuit, and tell the poor bastards they're better off taking the haircut than going to court and getting less, even if they win. Way to go, Florida Legislature and Wee Guv.
But . . . but . . . but . . . setting aside the rigging of the system, there's a cold reality (play on words intended) that underlies the developments in the Florida insurance market. The same climate change that's done away with winter in the north has made Florida a far riskier place to encamp, with the occasional monster hurricane that wipes out a whole swath of the state every year-or-two. The WaPo article discusses a couple who retired to Satellite Beach a few years ago, and saw their insurance bill go from around $8k a year to $54k. That's not corrupt politicians, although there's an opportunity for shenanigans given that premiums in most property markets in Florida have to be approved by the state (specifically, the Department of Insurance Regulation, staffed by folks picked by the same politicians greased by the insurance companies). In theory at least, the proposed premiums can't bake-in an excess profit margin. Rather, we're reaping the effects of an increasingly volatile coastal climate (and we have a lot of coast, folks) and millions of people flocking there and building expensive residences that will be even more expensive to replace after the next Cat 4.
There's a reason this little slice of heaven was once sparsely populated, and the cracker cottages that housed the mullet fishermen and farmers weren't much--they understood, even without global warming, that the weather gods in the Sunshine State had a bad habit of knocking everything down every few years. No use building that grand mansion.
So in the end, our friends here in the Southern Tier of New York and our neighbors along the Gulf Coast of Florida are all bearing the consequences of the climate shift that is taking place right before our eyes. I almost wrote "climate catastrophe", but won't judge what is a scientific fact--that would be as dumb as calling gravity or entropy "tragic". It just is.
And this is to say nothing of the folks who are truly on the front lines of this war the planet has declared on us sentient beings; specifically, those who cast themselves adrift in the Mediterranean or who carry children on their hip while walking north toward the Estados Unidos, hoping to escape drought and famine and the political dysfunction those horsemen carry along with them.
But for now, it's time to bill a little. The holidays pounded my work productivity, and I'm admittedly having a little trouble getting it in gear this week. My first call is in an hour, and I need to sound like I've read the file.
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