Climate change, insurance companies, and criminals

Swiss Re is the world’s second largest company in the reinsurance business, the business of insuring insurance companies. In 1990, when the first report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out, Swiss Re decided that sea-level rise, desertification, and other risks of climate change are real. If the company failed to take them into account, it risked losing money.

Now, Swiss Re is in the vanguard of companies and organizations that are raising the alarm about climate change. Last year, it released a detailed scientific rebuttal of the arguments climate skeptics make against anthropogenic warming.

Swiss Re’s pragmatic position popped into my mind last week when I read a BBC news story about a scam. Swindlers are inviting climate scientists to attend fake conferences in London. To fool the scientists, swindlers created a conference website and pretended the meeting would take place in a real hotel, the Crowne Plaza on Buckingham Gate (shown here). To entice the scientists, the swindlers offered to cover all travel expenses—provided the scientists paid an upfront reservation fee.

The title of the BBC story was “Climate Scientists Targeted for Fraud.” When I spotted it on the BBC homepage, my first thought was that rogue climate-change deniers were creating mischief. It came as an odd relief to learn that the swindlers’ motives were purely and grubbily criminal.

It’s also oddly reassuring that for two classes of professional, insurers and criminals, climate change is a matter not of contentious politics or disputed science, but of cold cash. In this second decade of the 21st century, the cost of mitigating climate change seems to many people more real than the cost of doing nothing. But as the mean global temperature inexorably rises, doing nothing will clearly become more costly.