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Tornadoes pose bigger risk to homeowners than hurricanes, new research says 85%
7/28/2026, 5:30:27 PM
BS Summary: This video contains 21 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Representativeness Heuristic, with Availability Heuristic as the most egregious example at 20.3% saturation with 116 hits. Analysis detected 1,250 faulty-reasoning hits from 572 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 72.6% and a BS Rank of 85% (3,782 of 25,182 videos). This video is worse (more manipulative) than 85.00% of the video peer group.
If you own a home, hurricanes and floods
might be your top concerns when it comes
to weather-related damage, but new
research reveals there's a bigger
threat. According to the climate risk
modeling firm First Street, severe
convection storms like tornadoes, hail,
powerful winds linked to climate change
resulted in $82 billion in economic
losses globally in 2025. The firm says
that accounts for almost a third of
total natural catastrophe losses and
more than any other weather risk. $68
billion in losses alone were related to
storm outbreaks in the US, 7 billion in
Europe. Jeremy Porter is the chief
economist at the climate modeling firm
First Street. Thank you for being here.
So, what exactly are convective storms
and why is that in many cases they're more damaging and problematic than things like earthquakes and hurricanes?
>> Yeah, severe convective storms are just a collection of storms that we're all familiar with. So, things like tornadoes, hail events, straight-line wind events are just those thunderstorms that come through communities.
In short, they're they're short, intense, really violent storms that are driven by atmospheric instability.
And and the thing that makes them more worrisome right now is some of the stats that you pointed out.
We're really focused on the growth in losses and the disproportionate amount of losses attached to them, but the fact that they tend to be these broad events.
When a hail storm comes through, everything in a community gets damaged.
And that's different from a wildfire. That's different from a flood, where you might see certain parts of the community or certain neighborhoods or elevation play a play a role in what gets damaged.
So, it really is that large, widespread impact that we're seeing from these severe convective storms.
>> What does this mean for homeowners?
>> Uh and for homeowners, it it's a really direct impact. We've been talking a lot about affordability when you think about
what homeowners expect to pay for their home, the core components of of home ownership, principal, interest, taxes.
And there's some expectation around what those costs will be. Insurance rates are where we're seeing severe convective storms start to show up as tangible costs from these types of events.
And ultimately, what people are we're expecting to pay when they took out their mortgage,
they're not seeing anymore. It's making their homes unaffordable, and we're seeing insurance premiums increase in places where we maybe wouldn't have expected them to increase in the past.
>> Can you give us some examples? Is this basically like a larger American problem and maybe not just in places where we would see tornadoes?
>> Yeah, it is. It's a It's a much larger problem. For years, when we looked at the insurance data, we we would see this big swath of insurance premium increases in the middle of the country, northern Texas all the way up into Minnesota, stretching over into Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, even into North Carolina.
And we, you know, as researchers, you would look at that and you'd say, "There's not wildfires there. There's not There's not many floods there. Why are we seeing these big insurance increases?"
Well, it's that dramatic increase in hail and other severe convective storms that we've seen in that area that are driving that.
>> Jeremy, thank you for your time.
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