900 Tornadoes So Far in 2024
Everyone loves to keep records and beat records. Evidently 900 tornadoes at this point in a year is not a record, but it is right up there with the best of them.
Each day of late a tornado is in the news, touching down and destroying property and changing lives forever. What I found of interest was a comment by Kim Reynolds, Governor of Iowa. At a recent tornado disaster scene she was asked, “What do you attribute the high number of tornadoes to?” She replied with words something like, “We are in a current cycle of a high incident of tornadoes.” Meaning, she could not bring herself to use the words “climate change.”
Technically, she is alluding to the term used to avoid saying climate change by attributing increased global warming to “climate variability.” You know, the ups and downs of the ice age, etc. coming and going. The idea of ostriches with their heads in the sand is perhaps analogous to this type of thinking—speaking.
Whoever you are, whatever it is you do, do not let a political bias impact your thinking and speaking when you are confronted with facts that might not align with your preferred position---or that of the people who you hope to vote for you.
This much I know…insurance rates in Iowa and across the nation and world are going up. This is based on the increasing number of disasters. Insurance companies are not making those decisions based on vocabulary choices, rather it is the increasing number of property losses driving the need for more revenue via policy increases. More on these losses in another blog post.
