| By Leslie Kaufman On Monday, risk managers from around the Lone Star State gathered in San Antonio for a Risk & Insurance Management Society’s (RIMS) conference. The 75-year-old association has 10,000 members and 80 chapters globally, but this was its first Texas regional gathering. The conference-goers represent a growing field. Demand for risk management specialists is expected to go up, with an expected 54,000-plus new US jobs by 2029, according to the online job site Recruiter.com. Most of those in attendance work for private companies, and a smaller number in the public sector. They are charged with preparing for a wide range of hazards – from cyberattacks to major litigation to natural catastrophes like floods and hail storms. Helping risk managers prepare is a billion-dollar opportunity, and the halls of the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center were filled with businesses that would like a piece of the pie. They included BluSky Restoration and Cotton Holdings, which clean up after catastrophes, and consultants such as EY, which was touting its insurance recovery expertise. And then, of course, there were the insurers and insurance brokers themselves. Several hundred risk managers milled at coffee breaks and a cocktail hour with margaritas and empanadas, and a frequent topic of discussion was that insurance is getting too expensive. Like American homeowners, who have been pummeled by double-digit increases in premiums (often for policies that carry more exceptions and higher deductibles), the commercial world is hurting. Penni Chambers is a senior vice president for risk management at Hillwood, a Perot Company, which manages industrial properties such as warehouses. “When I started my career 20 years ago, wind/hail deductibles in Texas were a flat fee, like $50,000 or $100,000,” Chambers said in an interview. “Now you have to negotiate it as a percentage of the building, and for a $350 million warehouse, that’s in the millions.” At lunch one group of attendees wondered how insurance companies can stay in business if they keep raising costs. They reported that a seminar on “captured” insurance – essentially when a company insures itself – was packed. Even if they didn’t use the words “climate change” – and many here did not – they said that extreme and unpredictable weather is the crux of the problem. It’s hard to know what you are up against and how much insurance is really worth shelling out for when the weather keeps changing. Josh Salter, a RIMS staffer, expressed a common frustration. The same week last month that Texas Hill Country experienced deadly flooding, he noted, “a one-in-1,000-year storm hit North Carolina, and a one-in-1,000-year storm also hit Illinois. So how accurate can all this data be if we’re getting things that are only supposed to happen once in 1,000 years, three times the same week?” At one panel on extreme weather, the moderators put up a slide with regional wind and hail events just in May and June of this year. Two had damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. One crosses the billion-dollar threshold. “Historical data is not lining up with what we’re seeing right now” in terms of damages, said Chambers. “I think that is a huge concern for a lot of risk managers, because insurance carriers – you know, they’ve got 250 years of data, but that data looks very different now.” So how is her profession dealing with the shortfall of information? “Well, we come to RIMS to get educated,” Chambers said with a smile. “We need to learn what other risk managers are doing.” Subscribe for more news on the rising toll of disasters and the response. Proliferating misinformation | By Eric Roston While promoting his agency’s recently released climate report, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said that climate change is not making extreme weather more intense and more common. That’s counter to authoritative climate science research. His statements come amid a push by the Trump administration to eliminate climate programs and scientist positions and to reduce access to past US-produced scientific reports, while issuing new material that goes against mainstream findings.  Energy Secretary Chris Wright Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg “There is now a large body of scientific research documenting that global warming has intensified multiple types of extreme weather events,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford University. In a post this week on X, formerly Twitter, Wright said that reports that “climate change is making weather more dangerous and severe is just nonsense. That is just NOT true.” He underscored the point on conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s podcast. Scientists now regularly tease out the effect of climate change on specific heat waves, droughts and rain and flood events. The methods used in what’s known as attribution research have been refined over the course of two decades, and build on a much longer history of climate modeling. Wright also cast doubt on attribution science, saying on Shapiro’s podcast that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change never addressed the topic. The IPCC publishes a global review of science every several years that is considered the gold standard of climate research. In the group’s most recent report, published in 2023, the authors wrote, “Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened” since the previous set of reports published in 2013 and 2014. “Some recent extreme events lie so much outside the distribution of pre-industrial climate that it is virtually certain that they have been caused by human-induced climate change,” said Sonia Seneviratne, head of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich and lead co-author of the most recent IPCC report's chapter on extreme weather and climate. “For many other events, it can be clearly inferred that their probability of occurrence has been strongly increased due to human-induced climate change.” Read the full story, including more on attribution research. | 
