I watched that section for a few minutes and saw nothing remarkable in anything he said. Are you really sure you aren't the kind of person he's criticizing? A summary of his comments would be:
1. Claims are over the top. There have been so many wrong claims of apocalypse that it's now really hard to get people's attention. "Most of you barely looked up from your phones at the prospect of non-survival - it's become so hyperbolic that nobody really knows how to get anyone's attention at all". He compares to the claims of gold bugs and about Y2K.
2. Climate activists generate far too much banking work given the time frames and nearer term problems. "We've got the China problem, a housing crisis looming, interest rates climbing, an inflation crisis, and I'm being told time and time again to spend time looking at something that's going to happen twenty or thirty years hence. The proportionality is out of whack".
3. At the moment, markets agree with him more or less. The more often the phrase "climate catastrophe" is mentioned in the press, the more valuable risk-associated assets become.
In other words he feels like bankers have nearer term job related problems to be thinking about like the cost of living crisis, the lockdown induced recessions, and not claims the world is ending which, historically, have proven to be inaccurate as a general class.
If you feel like these views justify firing or suspending people then you're the sort of person he's criticizing.
Edit: Here's a summary of the rest of his arguments.
1. People claiming the world is going to end need to either present arguments for why the market is mispricing everything despite millions of participants, or, why there's going to be a massive boom if climate risk is 'solved'. But currently they don't do that, they're implicitly arguing that the market is seriously mispriced, without actually stating so directly.
2. IPCC figures for actual impact of climate change are surprisingly low, on the order of 5% by 2100. However even if you accept those figures, by 2100 the economy may easily be 1000% larger, so a 5% difference would not be noticeable. Also GDP growth is perhaps over-rated in terms of importance: growth has completely stopped in the recent past and it was OK.
3. People often make misleading claims about extreme weather increasing, without noting that weather related deaths and costs have all been trending downwards significantly. Thus not only dry financial/economic metrics seem impacted in only low ways, but also 'lifestyle' metrics. Humans have been pretty fantastic at adaptation and there's no reason to assume this will change.
4. "I don't doubt the science at all". California's fire budget is only 1% of their state budget, or .1% of their GDP. If economic growth continues as expected, even with more fires, that is solvable through adaption.
5. We spend way too much on mitigation financing and not enough on adaptation financing.
6. There's a difference between volumes and prices (this seems like a technical financial argument), e.g. revenues can fall without profits/prices changing because there's an indirect relationship. There will be winners and losers whose share prices go up and down, during green transitions there's going to be both and it's possible to build portfolios around both. E.g. at the moment coal indexes are outperforming renewables, but it's been different in the past and things will swing back and forth.
7. "Even if climate risk isn't negligible it's too far in the future to matter for most companies". This is again a technical point related to the priorities of bankers. He says company valuations don't really go beyond 20 years. Avg loan length is 6 years. Even if you assume the "Sharons and the Mark Carneys" of the world are totally right about everything and the world ends in fire and destruction in 30 years (not sure who Sharon is but seems to be a prior presenter), then from the perspective of a banker it doesn't matter because it's still too far in the future to actually be important for day to day financial activities.
8. He criticizes central banks for spending far too much time on climate risk instead of things they're meant to be thinking about like inflation and asset prices.
9. One climate risk that markets may not be pricing is the possibility of a giant unexpected carbon tax. Many claims by central banks about climate risk being high, are in reality when you check the fine print of the models, actually modelling implausible economic growth dynamics and massive interest rate shocks, which they then present as "climate risk" to make headlines. This isn't reported and he feels central banks are manipulating models in order to make headlines.
10. If we'd tried to model climate risk in the 1920s with today's knowledge of climate science, they'd have got it totally wrong as they'd never have predicted deindustrialization, the impact of greener technology etc.
11. Conclusion, summary of argument: humans are extremely good at managing change. We need to be less doom-mongering and re-focus / re-gain perspective on what investment bankers should be focused on. We need to not be caught out by opportunities like Tesla, and there's lots of investment opportunities in the green transition.
Overall his talk is not even debating or doubting climatological sciences or predictions at any point. It is mostly about what bankers should be doing with their time.
You and lots of commentators seem to miss the important point that when Miami is 6 meters under water half of the 7.7 billion persons in the planet have to move from where they live. New York and San Francisco will be mostly gone.
But hey, who cares right? We always will have Paris and the The Hamptons...
I must have been completely distracted by all these Climate Change challenges. Fortunately we have HSBC (!!) and its head of responsible investing, from all people, to bring us back to Earth...Who would have though... \s
"Climate Change ‘Biggest Threat Modern Humans Have Ever Faced’"
I haven't missed any points, I've simply written what he is arguing. He is arguing that New York will not, in fact, be gone in 30 years, because it will have adapted just like Miami and Amsterdam. So too will other places.
Regardless, the premises of both your and his argument are weak. The idea that Miami will be six meters underwater in 30 years is not based on actual observations about sea level rises (which are utterly tiny and very stable), but are based on computational models that are programmed to assume massive and very fast feedback loops that end with the poles melting all at once.
We all learned a lot about how much academia cares about model reliability during COVID (they don't care, at all). Although the HSBC exec doesn't directly challenge climate models (only central bank risk models and the priorities assigned to them), models of all kinds have long histories of being wrong. Climatologists tend to respond to this by actually editing the historical record to make it appear as if they were correct retroactively, which is completely unscientific. This sort of behavior might be why the markets don't seem to acknowledge climate risk existing, which is a part of the guy's point.
Climatologists like to claim their models are or were accurate, but such claims have no real meaning because they change the temperature databases to make them right retroactively. It's hard to believe I know, I struggled to accept this at first, but they do it and they do it aggressively. It seems to have started around the year 2000 but the practice might date to earlier.
To wit: what they label as "observations" are not actually thermometer readings as they may at first appear, but rather data points after a complicated adjustment process. The averaging process then adds many more sources of modeled adjustment, so they keep changing the methodologies of both the individual weather station readings and also the composite averages post-hoc. About half of all warming visible in the (current) temperature record for the 20th century actually derives from administrative adjustments made after 2008.
You therefore cannot actually say how hot a particular year was, as far as climatologists are concerned. The past is not fixed. To make a claim about how hot it was in city X on date Y you must also reference dataset version Z.
This has a lot of strange effects. For example we often read about record setting temperatures. These records can be "unbroken" [1]:
"NOAA noted in a Friday press release that the previous record was set in July 2016, and tied in 2019 and 2020. But as Bill Frezza, a sharp-eyed reader of Retraction Watch noticed, the agency’s website tells a different story. This press release, dated Aug. 15, 2019, and still live on noaa.gov, proclaims July 2019 to be the hottest month on record for the planet."
Temperature datasets are like software (actually they are software). Some do occasional releases that make big changes. Others are actually continuously 'deployed'. As they explain:
"NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based on those new calculations, the new historical data can bring about updates to previously reported values."
For many years climatologists debated the nature and causes of the "pause" in global warming that started around the turn of the millennium. Many papers were published on this e.g. by the UK Met Office [2], many newspaper articles were written [3] etc. Temperatures had stopped going up and nobody knew why. No problem. The pause and all the many barrels of ink spilled on it, was simply written out of history. It was all just a big data mistake, they concluded.[4] Actually the pause never happened at all, and they proceeded to edit it out of the temperature databases.
They started removing the pause around 2015. By their own telling they can't even accurately measure trends in temperatures in past 20 years, but, for sure, they know what will happen in 80 years. It's not rational to treat a community that behaves in such a way as if they cannot make mistakes. They have repeatedly done so in the past, by their own admission!
Oh, that's what you meant. I don't really see the problem with that, [1] explains that the biggest bias that needs to be corrected is change of time of measurement. The actual measurements are just one of the inputs of a model (that can also produce temperature estimates for the places where the measurements took place at e.g. 12:00). I thought someone was rewriting the observations!
TOB is one of many justifications for making changes, and only applies in the first decades of the 20th century, yet they also have been adjusting temperatures recorded last year. And yes, they are rewriting the observations. The raw data sometimes isn't even available to the public, so the adjusted temperatures are what we get. It's those adjusted temperatures that get input into the models (that predict the future).
Regardless, there is a serious problem here. It doesn't actually matter if you agree with the rationales for editing the data or not - even if you are 100% on side climatology, the fact remains that they have radically changed their opinions about how the climate was changing in the past, and have done so multiple times (the long period of cooling that triggered the global cooling claims in the 60s and 70s is now no longer visible in the historical data either).
The existence of these changes are simply documented facts. By implication, despite studying climate for many decades they still don't have the ability to accurately measure current temperatures. Again this is not really controversial or up for debate, it's their own telling of the situation. To predict the future you have to be able to at least accurately measure the present.
I don't think he would've been suspended if he would've just critized climate change alarmism.
But when he dismisses the risk altogether by saying that Miami will cope with it? That's simply a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts and you're not allowed to do that when talking to investors.
I am not suggesting that, 2025 was never mentioned. The question posed by the HSBC exec is about whether Miami will still exist 100 years into the future. In the case of unmitigated climate change that seems unlikely.
