Don’t Need a Weatherman

July 7th, 2024

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” – Bob Dylan

We are getting a new roof installed on our house. We had not planned on doing that, but it’s going to happen anyway. It’s a small incident that, at least to me, indicates the direction of the future. I’ll try to explain.

Back on May 7th, we had a nasty thunderstorm roll through the area. We have always had thunderstorms in Wisconsin. They are nothing new. This storm was early for the season, and it was fierce. We had hail, which is also nothing new, but this storm produced hail that I had never seen before. We are used to small hailstones that might be as big as marbles. During the storm in May, we got large chunks of ice that looked like the ice cubes that come out of a machine. They were sharp and angular. For the first time ever, we had some damage. High winds slammed the hail against the west side of our house, and it tore up a couple window screens. After the weather cleared, I looked to see if the skylights were broken. They were intact, and I saw no other obvious problems. I got the screens fixed and thought no more of it.

Later, a young man from a roofing company came through the neighborhood. He was a storm chaser, looking for repair work to do. I let him do an inspection of the house for hail damage. He climbed up on to the roof. I hadn’t been up there. I don’t go on the roof anymore. That’s a bad life choice for an old guy like me. As I expected, he said that he found damage and encouraged me to file a claim with my insurance. I was leery of doing that, but I called the insurance company anyway. They told me that they would send out an adjuster to do their own inspection. I did not anticipate that the adjuster would find anything to fix.

I was wrong. I got a surprise call a week or so later and the person handling my claim told me that the company was paying $22K for needed repairs to the roof and gutters. I was dumbfounded by that. Really? Home insurance companies don’t hand out money like candy. They only make payouts when they have to do so. The fact is that, if I am getting money for a new roof, then probably most of the people in my neighborhood are getting something like that too. There are a lot of payouts being made.

I remember when I made the initial call to my insurance, I spoke with a young man who sounded world weary. He was helpful and polite, but obviously tired. I asked him if he was busy. He sighed and told me that he had been processing an endless list of damage claims from throughout the Midwest and the Great Plains. Extreme weather events were taking a serious toll.

All this makes me think of places like Florida, where for many people it is becoming next to impossible to get homeowner’s insurance. This seems to be the wave of the future. There are many climate change deniers, but insurance companies aren’t part of that population. Insurance companies crunch the numbers and coldly look at the statistics. They are about making money. It’s the free market in action. These corporations don’t think that climate change and the resulting extreme weather are fairy tales. They see these things as being very real.

It would be easy to dismiss my experience as an isolated incident. It’s not. A vast number of little things are adding up. For instance, I live near Milwaukee, and this part of the world just had its mildest winter ever recorded. I have lived here most of my life, and I know how cold the winters can be. This last winter season was slushy and rainy. I used the snowblower exactly once. That is extraordinary.

The climate changes are obvious to me. The only question is how is do we deal with them.