Insurance companies are already worried. I expect them to start writing into their policies exclusions about man made climate change. Which most people won't notice until it is time to file a claim. And then there will be a big uproar.
No single weather event can be reliably tied to climate change, though. Presumably it's on the insurance company to prove that an event falls into an excluded category, so it's a matter of time before someone fights them on it and wins.
Insurance is a business that’s mostly designed for uncorrelated tail risks. It works well for insuring shipping. It works pretty well for insuring against house fires. It can be tricky with natural disasters where the risks are quite correlated, though insurance companies try to prepare for it.
It works poorly for cases where the risks are unknown at the time the insurance is sold and then turn out to be correlated. For example asbestos-related lung disease claims basically wiped out many syndicates at Lloyds (though this was exacerbated by other problems like the accounting practices or underwriters having unlimited personal liability)
As a digression, I used to live in Shropshire and know of at least a few houses built close to rivers and streams that used to occasionally flood the ground floor. The buildings were set up to take this into account, with tiled floors and sturdy wooden furniture.
In one case I know well the old couple living there used to just chase the flood water out of the house with a running hose to clean it out. They sold the house to a young couple who redecorated the whole house and put carpets and stuffed furnishings on the ground floor. A few years later the whole lot was ruined, they sold and moved out. Apparently their neighbours tried to warn them.
Which for the majority of the UK means unpurchasable. With high rents in many places it's getting extremely difficult for a lot of people to save enough even for a deposit on a house, let alone buy it outright.
Oddly I think refusing to mortgage homes on flood plains is actually a good call by the banks. The local councils are just building in whatever idiotic places they like, stripping hills of the foliage which absorbs water to put houses there, then putting even more houses below where all the water now has to flow.
The effects of climate change are expected to be gradually increasing frequency and severity of extreme events. So that's not too hard to calculate probabilities for on the time scale of typical house insurance policies that are renewed annually. It's not going to be one giant storm that takes everyone by surprise.
I believe we are helping to build part of that future in my current startup. People should own their own data and have a right to use it for their own benefit.
I wonder what Alexander the Great would think about this. Did he think he achieved greatness? Was he happy and satisfied? Or did he suffer from the impostor syndrome like many "greats" of today?
He had historians follow him around, so greatness in posterity was clearly important to him. Objectively he inherited the worlds best army and a next door neighbor with an empire hanging by a thread. All he had to do was push. The fact that he gets to own the word “great” owes more to his understanding of history than any inherent greatness.
Whether he was happy or satisfied or suffering imposter syndrome feels like attaching modern sentiment to classical times. Dude murdered people by hand a lot and drank himself to death. I don’t think he was happy or satisfied, and I think he would laugh at the concept of imposter syndrome.
> Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, "Is it not worthy of tears," he said, "that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?"
(Plutarch)
(But as far as we know he did think he was great. "Only sex and sleep make me remember I am mortal", "If I were not Alexander I would wish to be Diogenes", and so many other lines suggest he thought he was awesome, note those quotes are my paraphrasing.)
There's no Europe wide prohibition. Specific countries disallow the sale of the product, but there's plenty of European countries where you can buy the health product.
It's also that the Romans thought they were going to be around forever so they built everything to last.
If you look at the Colosseum, it looks the way it is because it was willfully destroyed and used for construction material over centuries: when Rome became the seat of the Papacy, the Colosseum was remembered as a place where the early martyrs were slaughtered by wild beasts, not as a nice building to be preserved for tourists.
On the other hand many Roman bridges throughout Europe still stand and some are still in use (yes even by cars). But the really amazing case is the Pantheon, that was turned into a church early on and preserved and restored for almost 2000 years. It's true that not all we see is original, but the structural engineering is.
Random tangent: As much as I love living in sunny California, it saddens me that due to earthquakes, nothing we build here will still be around in 2,000 years.
