The Weather Report
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Hi, I'm Lila Miller. I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. And today we find out whether the future of our society is best off in the hands of government science done for the public good or big business out to make a buck. Comes to us from reporters Simon Adler and Annie McEwen. Okay, the only thing I'm going to ask, Annie, is that you stay like right up on your mic. Yeah, okay, Simon. Not a problem. Okay, so we're here to talk to you guys about...

The thing you talk about when you don't know what else to talk about, which is the weather. That's cute. The weather, that's great. But while talking about the weather might be the smallest of small talk, we're going to start with the story where it was anything but. It's early June 1944. Hey, who we had to finish? Give me up!

World War II is raging. And the Allies. They're getting ready for Operation Overlord, which is the D-Day landing. The largest invasion in human history. And, not to put a too fine a point on it, they were dealing with really crappy weather. Big swells, strong winds. Rain. Rain.

This, by the way, is meteorologist and historian Chris Harper. Professor at the University of Copenhagen. And she says the weather was so bad that Eisenhower was concerned they might not be able to do the invasion at all.

Are we going to have to postpone this by two weeks? If we have to postpone this by two weeks or a month, then like we've amassed all of these troops. Like the element of surprise goes out the window. And so Eisenhower needed to know when there would be some calm periods, some breaks, so that they could go ahead and make the landing. He needed a forecast. And I mean, there were only a handful of meteorologists in the military. And so he grabbed who he could get. This tall, dapper man...

Irving P. Crick. Eisenhower needed to forecast out a week in advance in order to do this. This is him in an old TV interview. And in it, sporting this white shock of hair hunched over a desk covered with weather maps. Here's the maps for the 5th and 6th of June, 1944. He says he was told to make this impossibly high-stakes forecast.

Literally life and death. Like, if the waves are too big, one of those boats is going to capsize and all those people are going to drown. Right. And eventually... June 6, 1944. Eisenhower gives the order, okay, we'll go.

And when that date arrived... At dawn, the channel is the scene of the greatest armada ever assembled. What kind of a day was it? Well, it was a day in which every element of the combat team, the amphibious forces, the gliders, the bombers, everyone could operate.

It turned out okay. Thank God. Yeah.

And of course, this victory became a huge news story. Alive forces have succeeded in their initial landings in France. The plans for the invasion were more complex than any before. And our man Crick... Imagine being the man who had to come up with the D-Day forecast. He became this hero. Dr. Crick successfully fixed June 6th. Dr. Crick, the man who predicted D-Day. Gosh, go Irving. Yes, but...

Only sort of? This is where the issue came in. Like, to be clear, while Crick was getting all the credit, there were multiple teams of meteorologists who worked on this with him. Two British teams and an American team. Okay. And in fact, Crick's forecast was overridden by these other guys who pushed it off for a couple of days. Ooh. Ooh. Yeah, right. Yeah, he didn't get the forecast right.

But when reporters would ask him about it... The regular weather service, both in this country and in England, did not feel confident in that type situation. He'd take credit. They couldn't forecast beyond two days, really, and it was one storm after another coming across the Atlantic and needing a week. They simply didn't want Eisenhower to take that risk. Irving! Oh, man. That just feels unnecessary. Yeah, it was really bad.

But this wasn't odd. Chris says long before World War II, Crick had a reputation for pushing the ethical boundaries. I mean, back in the 1930s when he was working at Caltech, he got a phone call and it was the producers of Gone with the Wind. And they said, hey, we need to burn down the city of Atlanta. What's that?

A gallon of lands must have set fire to the warehouses near the depot. We can't have big gale force winds coming in. Like, what's the best day we can film this? Huh. And so, you know, he gave them a forecast. Which is not inherently bad if you want to do forecasts for Hollywood. Super. But he made this forecast on university time with U.S. Weather Bureau equipment.

and got paid for that. Wow. You know, like, you just don't go there. You could piss a lot of people off with that one. Yeah, you just don't go there. And so, well, these two famous forecasts... Conditions had to be just right for the burning of Atlanta. ...made him sort of a star in the eyes of the public. Dr. Irving Crick, the most successful weatherman in the world. The hottest thing in meteorological history.

Professionally, it was a very different story. After D-Day, most meteorologists didn't want to be necessarily associated with Crick. And so the president of Caltech was so embarrassed by the whole thing. And so he just completely shut down the entire meteorology department. So Buddy needs another place to take his skills. Yeah. Not feeling so bad for him, but yeah. Yeah.

At all. I don't think we need to feel bad for him. He sort of made his bed and is now lying in it. And because what he did next, well, it shook meteorology and changed our relationship to the weather in ways we're just beginning to fully feel today. Crick was clever. This is meteorologist Howard McNeil. He was a contemporary of Crick's. Yeah, he was a very charismatic individual.

And he was his own man. And so, Howard says, after Crick got fired, he was basically like, f*** you. If you don't want me, I don't want you. And in fact, I don't need you. Because you know what I got? I've got fame. And that thing I did for Gone With the Wind, providing a personalized forecast and getting paid for it, like, I'll just do that. Private weather service. And in those days, that was a pretty radical thought.

And so Crick started his own company, this sort of shadow weather bureau, hiring people like Howard. I went to work for Crick. And offering forecasts to anyone who would pay. And before long... Business was booming for him.

Thanks to his talent, Crick's list of clients reads like a world atlas. His work has brought praise from a host of private clients. We were doing all this consulting work for the motion picture studios and power companies and agriculture. Wanting to avoid costly rescheduling or delays, farmers hired him to tell them when to water. Quiet on the set!

Film crews hired him to tell them when to film. Civil engineers working on bridges, construction people. Builders when to build. For the U.S., Canada, Europe, and North Africa.

To help his retail clients, he did things like direct shipments of umbrellas to stores where it would be raining and sunblock shipments to places where it'd be sunny. He even dabbled in marketing. I mean, in a matter of years, the guy

Did what no one thought was quite possible, which was he turned the weather into this product. Crick, Crick, Crick, Crick, Crick. Are we on his side now? We're still not liking him? No. I'm less on his side. Well, you're not alone.

Okay, do you remember anything about what the meteorological community's view was of Crick? Well, they just didn't like the idea of selling them. Chris Harper actually interviewed a bunch of meteorologists from back then about this very thing. Meteorologists like Edward Lorenz here. So part of the concern was that he was selling the forecast.

And as he explained to Chris, up until this point... But Crick, you know, he was doing it for profit, which sometimes meant stretching the truth.

Okay. All right. Okay. Like here in this TV interview. Hey, doctor, first question is just for those who don't know. Commercially, what can you offer a client in terms of long-range weather? Well, we can offer them temperature and precipitation far out into the future, sometimes for years in advance. Oh. Okay. Yeah, he claimed he could forecast a year out. Okay.

Which, even today, if you ask a meteorologist, they'll tell you it just isn't possible. Now, the way we've discerned it is unique because we don't make a theory and then try to fit nature to our theory. I learned this 50 years ago when studying with Einstein. He said, don't try to... Einstein? Yeah. You watch nature and let nature tell you what it's doing and then you'll have the answers. And that's basically what we've done. Interesting.

And just for the record, Crick may have bumped into Einstein once or twice at Caltech, but he certainly didn't study with him. Like, Profitt got involved and he was no longer just a scientist. He's a salesman, is what he is. And ironically, all of the data he was using to make these forecasts, to make this money, it was all government data.

And yet, for reasons that remain sort of unknowable, the man seemed to have a vendetta against the very institution providing it to him. In fact, Crixon, basically, he told me privately one time, he said, I'd like to close down the National Weather Service. That's what my goal is, to close them down and have it all turned over to private enterprise. Come on, that's so...

That's a supervillain thing to say. Yeah. Wow. Then he cackled maniacally after he said it at the time. I don't know. Clap of thunder. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. Then lightning. Now, Crick kept making forecasts up until his death, and his company is actually still around today.

But of course, you know, he didn't manage to take down government weather. Well, it's hot as balls. And thank goodness. Where are we? We're at the weather palace of the United States of America. And it is a palace. Because I got to say...

Like, in the years since Crick, government weather has become maybe our best, maybe our only remaining example of a true marriage between government serving the public good and the highest levels of science.

Hello. Good morning. And so to see this up close, we went to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, to meet some of the people who pull this off every day. What do you have on your tie here? This is Earth and weather satellites. And did you wear it for us, or do you wear something like this every day? Uh...

And hanging out with these folks, like meteorologist Jordan Gerst here... LOL. LOL.

It was clear that weather forecasting is this incredible triumph of data capture and analysis. Weather data are the basis of prediction. So we collect so many different kinds of observations that the amount of data that comes in is absolutely enormous. It's just the...

the best big data problem that I think we have on this planet. So yeah, let's talk about that for a minute. How many observations will you all be taking in this day? In innumerable amount, billions. Billions? Billions. 6.3 billion.

This stuff gets fed into computer models and lands on the desks of scientists like... I'm constantly switching between different surface observations. Ian Russell and Allison Santorelli. Yeah, so I'm working on fronts in the medium range period, which... Who blend that data with other data... During that period that I'm forecasting for. Compare it to historical data... There's Jason. He's working on ocean prediction. And simply put, synthesize it into the forecast that you and I get for free every day.

All of this so that we can decide whether to wear a light coat or a heavy coat. Exactly. And also... You know, prepare for the worst. I mean, these forecasts and these warnings save an untold number of lives each year.

Which, you know, in our divided times is sort of strangely unifying. Like, Noah is equally looking out for all of us. And nobody's like, you know, those Democrats, they've been putting their finger on the scale and saying it's going to rain. Or like, whatever. Yes. Like, everyone's basically like, good, yeah, okay, I'm going to plan using this information that the government has provided to me. It does feel neutral. Yes. Yeah.

people, by and large, trust them. But, yes, here's the but, we're now at a moment in time where the government's scientific dominance when it comes to the weather and this view of weather forecasting as a public good, these are both under threat. And in a sense,

Irving Crick's dream is finally coming to fruition. Minor changes in weather can trigger major business impact. I mean, private weather forecasting is currently a $17 billion a year industry in the U.S. Use weather forecasts to improve customer service. Embed weather into your business. With one report saying there are as many as 45,000 different companies involved. 45,000 Irving P. Crick. Take control of tomorrow, today.

And on our trip to visit Noah.

So where are we going? We actually drove out to meet one of them. Oh, there he is. This dude waving at us. Hello. This is Andy. Hi, Andy. How are you? Good. How are you? Good to see you. This silver-haired, always smiling guy by the name of Don Bershoff. CEO of True Weather Solutions. They call me the weather Don in the business. He is the weather Don. That's so good. They do, right? I mean, yeah. Nice to meet you.

Are you wearing socks with umbrellas on them? Yes, I am. Before starting True Weather Solutions, Don was kind of a big deal inside the National Weather Service. I was assigned to technology director at $130 million budget. My job was to find the best science, the best technology, and try to integrate it into operations. Anyhow, we met up with him at a drone range...

This big open field where people can test their unmanned aircraft. "Alright, we're gonna see his drone, and there's Don with his drone." And the reason we were there was actually to see one of his. "Look at this thing. Okay. Can I pick this thing up?" "Yeah, go ahead." It was all black, weighed about five pounds. "It's very light." Looked a lot like a curling stone with a bunch of propellers attached to it.

It's science quality, measures temperature, wind, pressure. It's fully automated. It's amazing. And this little drone, it represents a huge shift that's underway. Because while Crick had to rely on the government for data, Dunn

Don, with a fleet of these drones and other devices, is beginning to collect and sell his own. We've never had this kind of data before. Okay, well, so we were at NOAA, and they were saying 6.3 billion observations every day. How is this going to make a dent in that? Well, maybe what NOAA didn't tell you is that we have a data void below 5,000 feet,

Yeah, turns out the government's best way to collect atmospheric observations is still launching balloons up into the sky twice a day.

So having something like this going up every 90 minutes and giving you data is going to be the game changer. But it's not just this that's going to help us. Next, Don walked us over to this mini fridge-sized device with a

eyeball-looking mirror on the top of it. This is just basically a laser that pops straight up and looks up in the sky. So right here, out of the eye, bzzz! Yeah, and can see particulate matter moving. Like raindrops or what? No, no, dirt. Dust. And then it computes the winds from the movement of those particles and tells us what the winds are doing up to 800 feet at 10 layers. They give us 10-layer wind measurement. Again, we don't have that data today. And why are you doing this

And why isn't NOAA doing this? You really want me to answer that question? Yeah, of course I do. All right, so something like this is very difficult to get into the budget because it requires resources. And I'm not sure it's necessary to meet their mission. Don says the government's goal is to make big national forecasts. And to do that, there are better things for them to spend their money on. But companies, obviously, they have very different goals and therefore need very different kinds of data.

Walmart's super inflation buster sale blasts through the inflation barrier with big discount savings. I mean, just as one example of what these companies are up to. Several years back, Walmart came out and explained that cross-referencing their weather and sales data, they found that clouds and wind...

influence the beef people buy. Meaning, if it's hot, cloudy, and windy, I want a cut that's tender, that's juicy, and it's aged just right. for some reason, people tend to buy steak. But the minute those clouds go away and the winds lessen, people want burgers. And knowing this, Walmart is serving you different digital ads based on the weather at your zip code.

I mean, companies are beginning to use weather data to guide their business in the same way Facebook and Google use user data. And Don says for lots of these companies, the government's data, it's just not what they're looking for. It's not precise enough. So we actually are going to bring precision to the game. Said like a true salesman. No, spoken like a true scientist.

No, I'm a scientist. I'm not selling you here. I'm telling you. I know that we can do better. Now, Don's quick to point out that his data, it could be used to help improve government forecasts. NOAA is going to want to buy this data. And I talked to the Weather Service the other day about this. I'm not trying to hide it. Because when you combine these types of observations with the government data, put it into our models, now you're going to have unimaginable knowledge of what's happening.

But just because Don's willing to share it doesn't mean that every company is going to be so open. And so while any company out there can get all of the government's data for free, there's no promise that the government or you or I or any government agency is going to have access to their data.

You got it. There are commercial data sets that the government may not be getting. And so at some point, there's going to be a company here that's going to outperform the government forecasts. And at that point, you know, what's the future of government weather? Or more pointedly, you know, what's the future of how we use the weather to make decisions?

You know, we've just started working with cities as well. The city of Hoboken is an example. Lastly here, this is Dan Slagan. He's the CMO of a commercial forecasting company called Tomorrow.io. Like Don's company, they are collecting their own data. We take into account both public and private data sets. They're launching a satellite later this year, and they're doing crazy things like looking at the way a cell phone signal drops between towers.

because they found they can figure out rainfall from that. That's so weird. Wow. Anyhow, he says Hoboken hired them to provide information that the Weather Service just couldn't. They first started working with us to cut costs around specifically winter snow and icing operations. So just meaning how many trucks do we need to send out? How much salt do we need to deploy? And

And while snow removal is harmless enough... With climate change, every single city, every single government, every single country is going to need a climate security and climate resiliency plan. In other words, as the weather gets less predictable and more impactful...

Cities are going to have to make all sorts of tough decisions about what building permits to give, where to draw new floodplains, and where to put new cooling centers. Right now, we're seeing cities start to understand that you can really use us to make all these types of decisions. So the need for what we're doing is only going to become bigger. And the approach that we've taken, we really expect to be the source of truth for weather for the world.

Wow. It's that thing. It's like you add, I mean, you have the, you know, U.S. Weather Bureau and it just feels like civic goodness. We'll collect, we'll report, we'll be in it together to help each other. And then you add this sort of market incentive and it just evolves the technology so much quicker. Totally. And I mean, returning to Crick once more, like despite his faults, the guy was forecasting with a computer before the weather service.

and you could argue pushed government weather into the computer age. But with this speed and innovation comes less equity, right? Yep. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, what happens when two cities next to each other have to figure out where to put flood walls and one of them can afford a company with proprietary data and one can't? I mean, it appears the weather is

this thing we've all had equal access to, is beginning to fracture so that the more money you've got, the better the predictions you can get and the better you can plan and prepare. And this is happening right as summers are getting hotter, as hurricanes are getting stronger, as rain and thunderstorms are getting more intense. So the timing isn't great for all of this to be happening is what I would argue. That's a very good point. Hmm.

So you can take a minute to think about all that. But when we come back, Simon and I dive into a particular place where profit driven weather prediction might just be the thing, the only thing that can help us face our changing world. And we'll get to that right after a quick break.

There is a continual battle going on between warm air moving up from the tropics and cold air coming down from the Arctic. A weather front is where the two air masses meet. The cold air plows in under the warm air and throws it up to where it's cooler. That, in turn, causes it to lose its moisture as rain or snow.

That, very simply, is the process of weather. Different fronts and pressure patterns creating every kind of weather imaginable. Hi, this is Maribeth Abethabel from Oregon, and I just wanted to tell you about Radiolab's newsletter. Every Wednesday morning, the team at Radiolab sends essays about stuff they can't stop thinking about, staff recommendations, and other fun surprises. My favorite part of the newsletter so far was Robert Krolich's video called Engine Trouble.

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♪♪

All right, Lulu. Latif. Radiolab, we are back. Before the break, we witnessed a parade of salesmen trying to make a buck off the wind and rain. And now we're going to hear a story about a for-profit prophet who just might be our best hope for the future. Thanks so much for that, Lulu. And of course, for that story, we're going to swivel to the weather desk where our crack team of forecasters, Simon Adler and Annie McEwen.

We'll take it from here. All righty. So for this next part, we're going to leave behind Crick and Gone with the Wind and turn to something that is perhaps more worthy. Yeah, definitely. Of the silver screen. Wait, who would play you? Who do you want to play you? Oh, I don't know. I mean, Sandra Bullock, I'd take her. Okay. This is Karen. Karen Clark. Playing herself. Yes. And the scene opens 1987, London, England.

in a large, high-ceilinged, wood-paneled room. It was called the, it's still the Lloyd's Library. She's at a place called Lloyd's. Lloyd's of London. The oldest insurance marketplace in the world. Very successful, very prestigious. And so rich, they even insure insurance companies. It's called reinsurance. For risk-taking is their business. These are the big dogs of the insurance industry, and about 150 of them, in well-tailored suits, are taking their seats.

They were all men, very proper British men. I don't even know if women were allowed in lois at the time. Oh, really? Probably they were. Probably they were. But you didn't see many women there, except for the administrative help. And Karen, who is young and American and a woman, makes her way to the front of the room. I was seven months pregnant at the time. Whoa.

Waddling around, setting up this computer, which I don't know if you know what a compact computer is, but a portable computer, you kind of had to wheel it in. Stretching the definition of portable. Yes, exactly. And she was there to give a presentation on a kind of tool that she had just built. My hurricane model. The world's very first predictive hurricane computer model. Whoa. Ooh.

She showed them how, by gathering all the scientific data on past hurricanes and plugging it into a computer, she was able to generate a very large catalog of potential future events. A list of possible hurricanes on the horizon. She then showed them if she slammed those possible future hurricanes...

into some properties, say, on the eastern coast of the United States, she could prove that the loss potential was much higher than insurance companies thought. The insurance safety net was far too small to cover the damage that she was there to tell them was coming. And that meant all those men sitting in that room were going to lose money. A lot of money. Right.

Wait, question, question. Is she sniffing out climate change? Well, she's not quite sniffing out climate change. Like this is the mid-1980s, so it's a little early to be on top of that. It's more like she thought that she could offer something that government services could not. Like the government was letting people know if a hurricane was on its way, but they were not forecasting out 10, 20, 30 years in terms of what hurricanes could look like.

And Karen figured that that's exactly what the insurance industry really needs. But when she finished her presentation, instead of a flurry of excitement... It was very silent. I don't think there were any questions. No questions. No questions. But they were very polite, you know, very respectful. Is it because they thought you were wrong or the model was wrong? Why weren't they more interested?

You know, they were already reinsuring hurricane risk in the U.S. And they thought they'd do it very well because they had been making a lot of money in the 1970s. And in the early 1980s, there were no major hurricanes to hit, especially a major populated area in the U.S. So, you know, when it came to hurricane risk insurance,

They were already the smartest people on the planet, of course. But that was not going to last. Watch our teamwork. Channel 4 News.

So we're going to zoom ahead here to 1992. By this time, Karen has started her own company. And she has a five-year-old at home. Yeah, almost five. And she's got also two other kids. So she's got three kids now. Okay. And she's doing the thing. She's doing computer modeling. Yes. She has about 30 clients. She helps them price insurance, offers day of loss estimates whenever there's a hurricane, and she's also a business owner.

And her clients are using her model, but rather than letting it guide their decisions, they're sort of just using it as one data point of many. In other words, they were not really taking it seriously. Exactly. Exactly.

Which brings us to a Friday afternoon in late August. There was a tropical storm out there named Andrew. Oh, okay. It was pretty far out and nobody was really worried about it. And speaking of Andrew, you can't help but wonder how the prince is reacting to the latest royal ruckus. Everybody thought it was just going to be a nice weekend. But... Eight minutes after six, the first tropical storm of the season getting stronger, not

Very quickly, that changed. And by 11 a.m. on Sunday morning, it was a cat four. An absolutely enormous hurricane headed directly for Miami.

People stop driving. It's not safe to be driving on these streets anymore. It is starting to rock and roll out here. The power just went out throughout all of this Hallandale area. It is a big hurricane. The ocean has begun to invade the land over here. The absolutely most intense heart storm right now is coming ashore. Get to that interior closet. Get your family in there. Come on. Come on.

We understand right now we can perhaps get the first look at what's going on up in the air from Sky 4. Rob Pierce, are you with us right now? We're going to look to show you some of the devastation down here at the Dayland Trailer Park.

The destruction that Andrew left behind was completely staggering. This is about 8.30 this morning. Oh, my goodness. And this is their view of their bedroom. This place looks bad. It looks like Hiroshima. Tell me what you see. Sixty-five people died. Thousands and thousands of people lost everything. Kids were saying, Mommy, what happened? Why is God doing this to us? And my husband was holding the roof. My father-in-law was holding the roof. Everything fell off.

This is terrible. I wish I'd never go through this again. And while it was obvious to everyone that Andrew had been a big one, shortly after the storm made landfall, Karen knew that as soon as possible, her clients were going to need to know... How much is the total damage going to be? What is the storm's price tag? And so that same morning... Very early, we came into the office. They turned on the lights and fired up the computer model.

They wouldn't know the true extent of the damage for months. And the numbers, of course, were still flowing in. So that meant that we had to run as fast as possible, as many scenarios as possible. They plugged into the model estimates on where it made landfall, peak wind, size, as well as an estimate of all the values of all the properties that had been hit. The homes and the businesses. People's things, people's lives that had been in Andrew's path. And they'd run the model.

And then... Change the parameters. Rerun the model. Tweaking it and running it. Let's look at the uncertainty. Suit jackets had been taken off. Let's run it again. Sleeves had been rolled up. Does that look right? I don't know. Coffee had been spilled. It was pretty frantic. But because it was 1992, was there one computer or are you all on computers with headsets? No, we didn't have headsets at the time. I don't think headsets...

Even existed. I don't know. We just had one major computer. It was a SunSpark server. It had 16 meg of RAM and one gig of hard disk. But that's what we were running it on. So it was more like agitated waiting for the computer to spit out a number. And the computer's getting really hot. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The fan is whirring. Exactly. But finally... Oh my God.

They had their number. And then they just kind of sat there staring at it, asking each other, Could that be right? Because up until that very moment, The largest loss to date had been Hugo in 89, and that was only $4 billion. And the computer model was currently telling them that Andrew's price tag could exceed $13 billion. Jesus. Whoa. Whoa.

That was three times higher than any hurricane ever. If you're right, and this thing costs $13 billion, what would that actually mean for them? That they had been dramatically underestimating the risk and they had been dramatically underpricing their product. This is what she'd been trying to tell her clients all along. They'd not been charging people enough money for their insurance, and therefore they wouldn't have enough money on hand for what she was arguing would be... A much bigger loss than they thought.

Karen and her team faxed out that giant number. And within 30 minutes,

Karen's clients in London and New York refused to believe that number, saying things like... And... At least, that's the kind of reaction she was getting from guys in suits leaning back in office chairs. But on the ground...

It was a different story. It was unbelievable. It was just hard to fathom what had happened. This is Danny Miller. And I've been in the insurance industry right at 31 years now. In 92, Danny was a loss adjuster. And three weeks after Andrew hit, he was down in the wreckage of South Florida. Street signs were blown away. There were no landmarks. Just trying to do his best to actually find the properties. Trying to reach policyholders. Figure out how to get some cash into people's hands that need it.

And every night when he went back to his hotel, all the people sitting around the dinner table with him had been out working in the field all day too. You had a bunch of electrical workers there. You had a bunch of insurance adjusters and some military folks. And then you would cook out and you would make the best of it.

What was the dinner table conversation like? I've listened. I was younger at the time and talking to adjusters that have been in this business a lot longer than I had. They would talk about the losses. They would talk about the number of claims. I think it was north of 700,000. Were you getting a sense from these other adjusters that financially this was bigger than anything they had been involved with before? Yeah, absolutely. No doubt, Simon. I didn't mean to cut you off there. But yeah, from day one, you knew that it was bigger than...

anything that the insurance industry had ever dealt with before.

you know, it was evident that it was going to change the industry. This, this is total devastation here at Tamiami Airport. When the total damage in dollar form finally came in, Karen had been right. It actually turned out to be $15 billion. There is not a roof to be found in this neighborhood. And kind of overnight, people realized the homeowners and the business insurance had been woefully underpriced. And those insurance companies were in big trouble. A couple of carriers that we worked for,

For some insurance providers, there was just no coming back from Andrew. And the ones that didn't totally go under started to realize that they were going to have to start charging a lot more.

However, those companies, along with worrying about their profits, also have to deal with the government, the state government. And to these insurance companies, the government was saying, no way. You can't charge whatever price you want. How are the people supposed to afford insurance? And obviously the insurance regulators in Florida wanted to tamp down increases to the consumers. And so a lot of these homeowner and property insurance companies just left.

And to this day, most of them have not returned. And this all meant that when the dust of Andrew had settled, there were over half a million homes along the coast of Florida that could not find insurance. And you could argue that while that is hard, maybe it's for the best. Maybe people shouldn't be building there. Maybe it doesn't make any sense. But this is where the Florida government steps in again. Because.

Because people want to build there and politicians want to give people what they want. And so, you know, you had citizens stand up. The Florida legislature gets together and they create what becomes known as Citizens Property Insurance. It became the largest insurer in the state of Florida. A state-run insurance company, which formed to insure citizens.

And they charge far less than the private insurance companies. And since Andrew and Citizens Property Insurance, that coast...

has kept on booming. There was just a vast accumulation in the tri-county area, which has continued to grow. And this government thing is underwriting all of it. Correct. Wow. It's crazy to take a bet that you know is going to lose. Right. And, you know, it's obvious that it's not just an economic bet they're taking. Because when a hurricane rips its way along the Florida coast, along with all those buildings and properties...

It's also destroying lives.

People in harm's way. Robin, good morning. As you can see, the sun has come up here in Naples and it's our first real view of the destruction, the devastation left behind by Hurricane Irma. Extremely powerful and extremely dangerous. Hurricane Katrina. National Hurricane Center. Charlie heads toward the Florida West Coast. Since Andrew, there have been about 50, that's five zero, hurricanes or tropical storms that have caused damage to property or loss of life.

in Florida. Hurricane Wilma barrels down on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Hurricane Ian, the strongest September hurricane to strike the Gulf Coast in more than 15 years. And we now know that climate change is warming the oceans and making the sea levels higher. And for hurricanes, that means bigger, stronger, more destructive storms plowing into more and more heavily built up coastlines and the people who live there.

And while the government's actions seem to be ignoring that reality...

The insurance companies are staring it right in the face. Yeah, I mean, the insurance industry, you're not going to a conference that does not talk about climate change. You know, it is an obstacle and a challenge that we're dealing with every day. And after Andrew, Karen's model... It really exploded and, you know, every reinsurer had to have it.

And every insurance company had to have it. And of course, it grew to other perils, earthquakes, tornadoes, hailstorms. And Karen incorporates climate change data into a lot of her models. But whether or not they're effective... At the end of the day, it is a political decision, really, that...

You know, for example, like wildfire in California, right now the California Department of Insurance, they won't allow the catastrophe models. For some reason, they don't want the catastrophe models. So...

What the hell is that about? Yeah, because they're afraid that it's going to make the premiums go up. But as a consequence, they have a huge availability problem. And they have the same problem after Andrew. They have a fair plan, which is the state insurable last resort that's ballooning now because you can't get wildfire insurance in California. Wow. That's insane. That's totally insane.

It's like, let's put a blindfold on. Exactly. You know, it doesn't make sense. And just to be clear, California doesn't want that model to be run because then there would be hard numbers staring them in the face, much like yours with Hurricane Andrew, about how big...

The bag they might be holding would be, and therefore premiums have to go up, therefore everyday Californians need to pay an extra 50 bucks a month for their insurance. Is that the idea? Well, I can't speak to their motivation, but we can hypothesize on it. And if that's your theory, I'm not going to dispute it.

I just think it's weird. I mean, it just kind of swaps out public institutions and for-profit institutions in my head. I mean...

I have this very simplified understanding of corporations as not thinking ahead, just getting what they want, leaving messes behind, you know. And I think of the government as trying to not do that. And it's just sort of interesting that in this case, there's like a flip and there's action happening, but it's happening differently.

To simplify it, like, from the bad guys. You know? Well, and there's a little bit of both on both sides there. This is Director Emeritus for the American Meteorological Society, Keith Sider. And we ran all this by him. The story of Irving Crick, this insurance situation, and his take was oddly comforting. You know, market forces...

If you want to think in terms of a market that doesn't care about people or about any of those sorts of things, if you want to have it be sort of an uncaring market, all by itself is going to try to drive us in the right direction. You know, renewable energy now is the cheapest way to make electricity.

And so the economic drivers are not ones where we have to say, oh, we have to, you know, we have to give up something to get electricity that's clean. Now it's, that's the cheapest way to get it. And that gives me optimism because that means that now the people who do not want to see us move in the directions we have to move are working against market forces.

And it's hard to work against market forces for very long. Right. And so even, you know, if greed is on your side, then you've got a chance to move the ball a lot faster. I want greed on my side all the time. Yeah, me too. Greed is like an incredible wind at one's back. Yeah.

The road to Eden is paved with bad intentions. Yeah. Maybe sometimes. It's greed that got us into this problem. It's the exploitation of natural resources in the name of the almighty dollar that got us into this problem. And it's hard for me to imagine a way out that doesn't have those same characters at the forefront. Greed is green. Greed is green. Yeah.

This episode was reported by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen, produced by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen, with sound and music from Simon Adler and Annie McEwen.

Mixing help from Arianne Wack and Jeremy Bloom. Special thanks to Zandra Clark, Homa Sarabi, Santi Dharmawan, Francisco Alvarez at Convoy Inc., Maureen O'Leary, and everyone at NOAA, Simon Elkibetz of Tomorrow.io, Jack Neff, Joe Pennington, Brad Coleman, Morgan Yarker, Megan Walker, Eric Bramford, Jay Cohen, and Irving Crick Jr. for supplying us with tons of great archival footage and audio.

If you're curious to know more about the history of weather forecasting, go check out Chris Harper's book, Weather by the Numbers.

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