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When Warren Buffett appeared on CNBC's "Squawk

Box" Monday morning, his comments on how weather

disasters have affected the insurance businesses he

owns set commentators abuzz across the Internet,

especially around whether climate change has had any

impact or not.

Though it's difficult to say with any certainty what the

famed investor and CEO of Omaha, Neb.-based

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. thinks on the topic, he has

dropped hints in recent years that he agrees with the

science behind human-caused global warming.

In a 2009 New York Times op-ed, Buffett wrote that

"doubling the carbon dioxide we belch into the

atmosphere may far more than double the

subsequent problems for society. Realizing this, the

world properly worries about greenhouse emissions."

But that hasn't stopped many observers from

portraying his comments in the "Squawk Box"

interview as a smackdown of climate change and its

impact on natural disasters, as this commenter posted

on Twitter:

As his latest annual letter to shareholders points out,

Buffett's company is one of the world's biggest

Buffett says climate change a damp squib n24.cm/1mQk6L35:00 PM - 3 Mar 2014

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investors in renewable energy like wind and solar,

including a purchase last October of two huge wind

farms in California.

Here's the segment of the interview when Buffett

discussed the risks of extreme weather events from

his perspective as an investor and owner of several

large insurance and reinsurance businesses, through

his Berkshire Hathaway holding company:

We don't mean to take the Oracle of Omaha to task,

but it's worth calling attention to a few things said in

the interview on this topic and what the facts really

are:

1) The past few years haven't seen many

hurricanes, so climate change hasn't had

an impact.

Early in the interview, Buffett was asked whether

extreme weather in recent years has changed how his

company calculates risk, specifically in its insurance

operations. Here's how he answered:

"I think the public has the impression that, because

there's been so much talk about climate, that events

of the last 10 years from an insurance standpoint in

climate are unusual. The answer is they haven't. You

read about these events, but you were reading about

events 30 or 40 or 50 years ago.

"We've been remarkably free of hurricanes in the

United States in the last five years. So if you were

writing hurricane insurance, it's been all profit. There

have been some more tornadoes than normal, but it's

not had any effect so far. The effects of climate

change, if any, have not affected ... the insurance

market."

First, here's a look at the actual number of hurricanes

and tropical storms that formed each year in the

Atlantic between 1950 and 2013, from NOAA's

National Climatic Data Center:

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As NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

points out here, it's premature to say that global

warming has already had a detectable impact on

Atlantic hurricanes, the storms that affect the U.S.

coastline. So Buffett isn't wrong to say we've

experienced severe weather "30 or 40 or 50 years

ago."

But while there is an emerging field of study on

whether climate change is impacting severe weather

today, most scientists who study climate focus

primarily on how events like these will change over the

long-term future – how the greenhouse-gas-fueled

heating of the planet will impact droughts, floods,

precipitation patterns and storms like hurricanes

decades from now.

Model projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change suggest that warming could cause

hurricanes globally to be stronger on average, with a

greater destructive potential per storm, and with

substantially higher rainfall rates than present-day

storms. (Find much more on global warming and

hurricanes here.)

2) The risk of major catastrophe is no

different today than it was a few years

ago.

Because insurance is such an important business for

Berkshire, and a major catastrophe could have a

significant impact on its earnings, CNBC's Becky Quick

pressed Buffett again on the question above. Here's

how he answered:

"I calculate the probabilities in terms of catastrophes

no differently than a few years ago," Buffett replied.

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A small pool of water is surrounded by dried and cracked earththat was the bottom of the Almaden Reservoir on Jan. 28 in SanJose, Calif. Until storms dumped several inches of rain acrossparts of California in late February, the state was experiencingits driest year in more than a century.

Though as co-host Joe Kernan was speaking over him,

he added this qualifier: "That may change in 10 years."

Buffett is famous for being very careful when

discussing investing publicly (and for refusing to make

predictions about the future), so this caveat quite

possibly was no accident. Even so, it's important to

note that catastrophic severe weather events are far

from the only things that will be impacted by climate

change.

Though they get far less attention that hurricanes and

tornadoes, longer-term climate phenomena –

especially drought and temperature changes – pose

some of the greatest risks to human societies in a

warming world.

That's because if nothing is done to control

greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years and

decades, global warming is projected to trigger

irreversible shifts in climate patterns around the

world. Where we grow certain agricultural crops will


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shift northward, and water sources that millions of

people depend on today could dry up.

For an example of how dramatically changes in

precipitation can impact water supplies, look at this

2013 vs. 2014 comparison of snowpack in the Sierra

Nevada Mountains, which millions of Californians

depend on for their drinking water, agriculture and

recreation:

Today, the global population is estimated at just over

7.1 billion by the U.S. Census Bureau. By the middle of

the century, it will likely rise to between 8 and 9 billion.

As David Titley, the director of Penn State University's

Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk,

explains, this presents potentially huge problems in a

warming world.

Plentiful, reliable sources of fresh water are essential

to producing the energy we use every day, especially

for cooling nuclear, natural gas, oil and coal-fired

power plants. They're equally important to industrial

manufacturing and agriculture, by far the biggest user

of water worldwide.


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“When you’ve got that many people, it’s only natural

that you’ve got to think about where does their energy

come from," Titley said in a talk given by the American

Security Project last month. "Where does their water

come from? Where does their food come from? It

turns out that those three things are really, really

linked close together."

3) On 'apocalyptic predictions' of climate

risk: 'It hasn't been true so far.'

When Kernen asked Buffett what he thought of the

public's perception on how severe weather events had

impacted the insurance business, Buffett said this:

"I love apocalyptic predictions on it, because you're

right, it probably does affect rates. The truth is that

writing U.S. hurricane insurance has been very

profitable in the last five or six years. Now, the rates

have come down very significantly, so we aren't

writing much, if anything, in the U.S.," he said, adding

that when it comes to weather impacts on Berkshire,

"it hasn't been true so far."

Here, it's important to note that Buffett's point of view

concerns only the recent business performance of his

company, says Paul Walsh, vice president for weather

analytics at The Weather Company, the parent of The

Weather Channel.

"Warren is speaking in terms of recent history and he's

not making a specific commentary on climate change

or the future state of climate/weather related risk,"

said Walsh. "He's not in the business of making

scientific predictions – his point-of-view is actuarial

and financial."

With global warming, the climate changes that can be

expected in the long-term future will mean a world

much different than today's. Another way of saying

that is even better in Buffett's own words: "In the

business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer

than the windshield."

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