I’ve been involved in the trading of weather and catastrophe risk (I.e. trading instruments such as bonds or derivatives where the payout is linked to weather p

I’ve been involved in the trading of weather and catastrophe risk (I.e. trading instruments such as bonds or derivatives where the payout is linked to weather parameters, or insurance losses caused by natural hazards such as hurricanes/earthquakes). In my experience, it has become clear that there is a lot of muddled thinking about climate predictions, scenarios and the significance of single extreme events. Also, while there is a lot of public weather and climate data out there, there are a lot of data quality or provenance issues which make it hard for professionals, let alone the general public, to confidently make use of it and trust what it says. Also, the general lack of public understanding allows non-experts to take data and generate erroneous conclusions. I try as much as possible to educate and communicate around these issues and help clients have more confidence in data. Another are where there is a lot of muddled thinking is with respect to the ESG factors which are increasingly used by investors to assess Environmental, Social and Governance issues. There are a lot of ESG data vendors who essentially peddle meaningless metrics which add to the confusion.