Here are two recent publications wrt anthropic climate change.

The first one is more relevant to this board. It's a link to the .pdf released by the Federal Reserve yesterday, reporting on the results of an exercise to (I'll let them tell it) " ...learn about large banking organizations’ climate risk-management practices and challenges and to enhance the ability of large banking organizations and supervisors to identify, estimate, monitor, and manage climate-related financial risks".

Invited banks were Morgan Stanley, BAC, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPM and WFC.

Executive summary: they dunno

Here's the link to the download: federalreserve.gov - Climate scenario analysis exercise results

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The second one is not directly related to underwriting, just a report of a survey of nearly 400 climate scientists, published in the lay literature this week. I include it here because the banks above commonly wanted more data, more assessment, more models.

This isn't exactly that, admittedly. It's just a poll of a bunch of smart people worldwide, who spend their professional time looking at this topic and thinking about the data.

Executive summary: these 380 scientists are along the spectrum from disillusioned to despairing. The general attitude (a "consensus" of 380 scientists is not a physical possibility) can be summed up as "The world’s response to date is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools.” (A South African scientist who chose not to be named)

Here's the link: theguardian.com - Hopeless and broken why the worlds top climate scientists are in despair

Circling back to make this more BRK-specific: "if there is only a 1% chance the planet is heading toward a truly major disaster and delay means passing a point of no return, inaction now is foolhardy". That's Mr Buffett, in the 2015 annual letter to shareholders.

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My takeaway: Ajit's year-to-year policy underwriting seems sensible, kind of like bare-bones term life insurance. Make an annual bet, then renew underwriting next year.

Anything beyond that would give me the fantods (1)

--sutton

(1) a *great* word, taught to me by an older rural Southern patient years ago: "that MRI machine give me the fantods"