There should be a way to build fire resistant buildings to reduce the cost of insuring them, likely this would be the solution in California without price caps.
You can build out of concrete and use fire resistant materials like metal or tile for the roof and your house is nearly fireproof. These buildings would be realistically insurable in both California or Florida. They would cost more to build, not THAT much more though especially if land costs many millions, an extra 50k - 100k to build out of concrete is a very reasonable expense.
Steel frame, flame retardant insulation and cladding, rammed earth, .. these are all options.
Flammable trees well away from a leaf free clean guttered (or no gutter) house are also no compromise requirements.
See: https://research.csiro.au/bushfire/ and https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/services/testing-and-ce...
for the rabbit hole of Australian Bushfire housing certification and testing.
Burning Down the House: Trial by Fire CSIRO- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBtawn7IAnI
> Steel frame, flame retardant insulation and cladding, rammed earth, .. these are all options.
Don't even have to go that far.
Wood framing is fine: make your cladding stucco would do a lot (or brick). You can even have siding as cement-base stuff is available:
* https://www.jameshardie.com/blog/siding-types/what-is-fiber-...
You could have metal or clay roofing, but shingles with a Class A rating is available as well:
* https://www.ameriproroofing.com/blog/asphalt-roofing-shingle...
> flame retardant insulation
Which are almost definitely known to the state of California to cause cancer.
Elsewhere fiberglass and mineral wool insulation aren't regarded as carcinogens.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1947241/
https://mesothelioma.net/fiberglass-connection-to-mesothelio...
mineral wool insulation aren't regarded as carcinogens
https://www.jm.com/content/dam/jm/global/en/MSDS/20000000205...
From your link:
SECTION 11. TOXICOLOGICAL INFORMATION
IARC No component of this product present at levels greater than or equal to 0.1% is identified as probable, possible or confirmed human carcinogen by IARC.
ACGIH No component of this product present at levels greater than or equal to 0.1% is identified as a carcinogen or potential carcinogen by ACGIH.
OSHA No component of this product present at levels greater than or equal to 0.1% is identified as a carcinogen or potential carcinogen by OSHA
Trace amounts can possibly sweat out in specific conditions .. which is why you might choose to install with a vapor barrier.
Trace amounts can possibly sweat out in specific conditions
Those limits are:
recently manufactured products contribute no more than 9 µg/m3 of
formaldehyde into the indoor air
https://downloads.regulations.gov/EPA-HQ-OPPT-2023-0613-0230...
Vapor barriers limit human exposure, it has to travel into the occupied spaces to be an issue, then linger.
It also has to be the type of wool that has been treated, etc.
Yes absolutely, and as another poster pointed out, earthquake codes exist. Metal framing is probably a bit easier to adapt to the same earthquake codes that timber framing has.
Since you mentioned FL, we have mostly solved hurricane level wind resistant building codes. Hurricane ties are cheap and they work. Anything built post hurricane Andrew has these. There's also materials like Hardi Plank siding, which does add a bit more cost, but effectively surrounds the house in a thin layer of concrete. Flooding is a mixed bag. My house is built substantially up and off the ground above the '100 year flood line'. Even if a flood didn't enter the dwelling proper, it would still be devastating.
The problem is storms are getting bigger and more frequent from climate change and hitting areas they normally don't.
That's false. Hurricanes are not getting bigger or more frequent due to climate change.
They aren't getting bigger or more frequent at all.
NOAA has stated this multiple times and you can read an article addressing it here:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/can-...
It's well known that hurricanes go through multidecadal swings.
Why this keeps getting repeated when it's obviously false is beyond me.
Great article, scientifically written. I wish it was as confident as you are in your conclusion.
> No, we cannot confidently detect a trend today in observed Atlantic hurricane activity due to man-made (greenhouse gas-driven) climate change. Some human influence may be present
> The importance of this distinction between potential causes of AMV for future hurricane projections is clear: if strong man-made aerosol forcing and volcanic forcing were responsible for most of the “quiet period” of Atlantic major hurricane activity from the 1970s through the early 1990s, then a return to this more “quiet” regime in the coming decades may not occur. But if the “quiet period” of the 1970s through early 1990s (as well as the earlier quiet period of the early 20th Century) was caused mainly by internal climate variability, one would expect to return to relatively “quiet” conditions in the coming decades as the climate swings back and forth between more active and inactive Atlantic hurricane periods. This is an important research question that does not yet have a clear answer.
Meanwhile we continue to see stronger storms.
> Another hurricane metric, the fraction of rapidly intensifying Atlantic hurricanes, was reported to have increased since around 1980 (Bhatia et al. 2019), and they found that this change was highly unusual compared with simulated natural variability from a climate model, while being consistent in sign with the expected change from human-caused forcing. Even so, however, their confidence was limited by uncertainty in how well the single climate model used was representing real-world natural variability in the Atlantic region.
We do know for a fact that the ocean temperatures are rising. Also from your article,
> Global surface temperatures and tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures have increased since 1900 (by around +1.3 ˚C [+2.3 ˚F] and +1.0 ˚C [+1.8 ˚F], respectively), unlike the reconstructed hurricane counts or U.S. landfalling hurricanes. Finally, a number of studies have found that several Atlantic hurricane metrics, including hurricane maximum intensities, hurricane numbers, major hurricane numbers, and Accumulated Cyclone Energy have all increased since around 1980.
But climate science is about studying a complex system, and finding direct causations is hard.
> However, in a 2019 tropical cyclone-climate change assessment, the majority of authors concluded that the recent hurricane activity increases mentioned above did not qualify as a detectable man-made influences (meaning clearly distinguishable from natural variability).
Another study linked recently from climate.gov (near the bottom) https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2024...
>[R]ecent studies in attribution science show that climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and/or severity of tropical storms, heavy rainfall, and extreme temperatures.
So at the end of the day, it's fine to say there is no smoking gun, but it is absolutely not 'obviously false'. I think your biases are showing.
Ofc they hint towards it, it's climate.gov. But the actual data shown, shows no increase at all.
You won't find a "smoking gun" because it's not happening.
Your biases are in-fact showing that you don't realize you went from claiming it was true to "well we have no smoking gun".
I've been collecting a bunch of links on what things a homeowner can do. Probably the simplest thing is the clear a 5 foot ember resistant zone around the home. So remove greenery and replace wood chips with stone for example. Use fire resistant vents so ember does enter attic or crawlspace. Use Class A fire rated roof (which you can also get for asphalt shingles). If you have wood siding, replace with fiber cement siding...
https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-from...
https://readyforwildfire.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Low-...
https://osfm.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-engineering-and-inv...
> You can build out of concrete and use fire resistant materials like metal or tile for the roof and your house is nearly fireproof
Just like exactly the rest of the world? We, the non-USA folks, are looking yearly at either fires or hurricanes destroying these wooden houses there and people keep rebuilding them. Insanity.
The US has a practically limitless amount of wood. Europe doesn’t. Wood also holds up well to earthquakes and can be treated to hold up to fire. And if there’s a catastrophic failure, it hurts a lot less than concrete does when it falls on your head. It’s a great material that the US is right to use.
> We, the non-USA folks, are looking yearly at either fires or hurricanes destroying these wooden houses there and people keep rebuilding them.
You can build wood framed (2x4, 2x6) buildings that are resistant to fire:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZe-TlYxm9g
A stucco, brick, or fibre cement siding, have 2m/6' clear around the base of your house, tempered windows, and either a metal roof or shingles with a Class A fire rating.
Place a piece of wood inside the hot environment of a fire and it will burn down releasing more heat than it absorbs, adding to the fire. It doesn't matter what stuff you add to it.
You can make wood not burn on the kind of environment where it would be the only or main object releasing heat. That is still a completely different category from non-flammable materials.
Earthquakes make this a much more expensive option. To give you some idea, the design seismic acceleration for my house is like 3g. That's more sideways than down. The forces involved are the weight of the structure times this value. Concrete ways a LOT more. It absolutely can be done, but it's not clearly a superior material compared to wood.
The rest of the world has mudslides, floods, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, etc. Or they have no natural disasters, just like so many parts of the US.
> We, the non-USA folks
Isn't that a sad way to look at yourself?
> There should be a way to build fire resistant buildings to reduce the cost of insuring them
There is:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZe-TlYxm9g
But when a lot of your housing stock is multiple decades old that was built before modern building codes, there's a lot of kindling out there.