Overshoot: Navigating a world beyond 1.5°C
Jun 16, 2026 · 21 min · 10 segments
"Wouldn't it be nice if the banks and insurers stopped facilitating the activities that are probably going to have such severe impacts on their industries within the next 30 years?"Actuary Louise…
Louise PryorGuest
Laurie LaybournHost
It sounds like a key part of the job of actuaries is to engage with questions of risk.
But when we go out in the world and discuss these questions of risk, they look quite different depending on who you're speaking to.
And we might see that on the one hand, mainstream economists might say that their models show that four degrees of warming in the context of climate crisis might only knock a percentage or two off GDP.
Yet, on the other hand, you've got leading climate scientists saying that four degrees of warming would be fundamentally existential to humanity itself.
So how can both those things be coming from serious professionals just in different fields?
And the answer is that we all use models, right? We can't kind of run the whole planet through various scenarios to see what's going to happen because, you know, life's just not like that.
So that in the end, the results you come out with from your model depend very much on what assumptions you've made.
And one of the issues here is that the The scientists are thinking in very scientific terms and because of the sort of modelling they're doing, they have to take account of the impact of changing temperatures on quite a lot of what goes on in the sort of natural life of the planet.
Well, and when I say natural life, I kind of include weather systems and climate systems as well, because, you know, that's what they're about.
And they look at forests, for example, to a certain extent and want to know roughly what the impact is on forests, because that has a huge impact on absorption of greenhouse gases and so on and so forth.
Economists, on the other hand, don't have that connection to the natural, to the actual world, the real world.
Economists tend to think a lot in terms of money, well when I say a lot in terms of money, almost entirely in terms of money, and also a lot of their models are Assume that there's going to be no real big changes take place, that basically we're on a slightly bumpy ride, but the bumps are going to, if you go up a bit, you're going to go down a bit in the long term and so on.
And one of the big problems is here that with climate change, you're going to have, we believe, and the scientists believe, major irreversible tipping points.
So, for example, we've seen a lot in the news recently about the ocean currents in the North Atlantic that they may flip, and that's going to make a huge difference to us here in the UK.
And that, combined with the fact that they don't actually include natural resources, they assume that the natural world is essentially infinite and can go on providing us with what we want all the time, that means that the economists' models have some quite significant limitations.
It sounds like a key part of the job of actuaries is to engage with questions of risk.
But when we go out in the world and discuss these questions of risk, they look quite different depending on who you're speaking to.
And we might see that on the one hand, mainstream economists might say that their models show that four degrees of warming in the context of climate crisis might only knock a percentage or two off GDP.
Yet, on the other hand, you've got leading climate scientists saying that four degrees of warming would be fundamentally existential to humanity itself.
So how can both those things be coming from serious professionals just in different fields?
And the answer is that we all use models, right? We can't kind of run the whole planet through various scenarios to see what's going to happen because, you know, life's just not like that.
So that in the end, the results you come out with from your model depend very much on what assumptions you've made.
And one of the issues here is that the The scientists are thinking in very scientific terms and because of the sort of modelling they're doing, they have to take account of the impact of changing temperatures on quite a lot of what goes on in the sort of natural life of the planet.
Well, and when I say natural life, I kind of include weather systems and climate systems as well, because, you know, that's what they're about.
And they look at forests, for example, to a certain extent and want to know roughly what the impact is on forests, because that has a huge impact on absorption of greenhouse gases and so on and so forth.
Economists, on the other hand, don't have that connection to the natural, to the actual world, the real world.
Economists tend to think a lot in terms of money, well when I say a lot in terms of money, almost entirely in terms of money, and also a lot of their models are Assume that there's going to be no real big changes take place, that basically we're on a slightly bumpy ride, but the bumps are going to, if you go up a bit, you're going to go down a bit in the long term and so on.
And one of the big problems is here that with climate change, you're going to have, we believe, and the scientists believe, major irreversible tipping points.
So, for example, we've seen a lot in the news recently about the ocean currents in the North Atlantic that they may flip, and that's going to make a huge difference to us here in the UK.
And that, combined with the fact that they don't actually include natural resources, they assume that the natural world is essentially infinite and can go on providing us with what we want all the time, that means that the economists' models have some quite significant limitations.
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