Is climate change really affecting our weather?

Anyone who's done any amount of weather watching knows there have been more frequent and severe storms, flooding, wildfires and other weather-related events. Often, these shifts are attributed to climate change, but there are other factors that come into play as well. In an upcoming DigIn podcast, Dr. Louis Gritzo, chief science officer at FM, explains some of the weather phenomena across the globe and what's affecting these changes. Gritzo focuses on developing technical strategies to handle emerging and underserved risks and has been following the science affecting weather changes for some time.

"Well, the biggest overriding factor on all the things that we're seeing that affect hazards and risk is this overall very slow general trend of an increasing global temperature. And when I say global, it's the temperatures measured all around the world averaged over the entire year and you get one number, and that's the one-and-a-half degree C that you sometimes see referred to when we're talking about changes in the climate or certain things relative to the climate," he shares.

"So that's just one number and it smears everything together, but it's definitely going up and it bounces around a little bit, but the general trend is it's going up. So that kind of overall very slow trend beyond seasonal or annual variability is the big change in the climate."

Gritzo also says that while the increase in temperature is not creating any new hazards, it is definitely exacerbating some of the existing ones as they become more frequent and severe.

In the podcast, he also details how insurers and science can play a role in helping policyholders and risk managers better prepare for some of the weather challenges created by these stronger and more active events.