Meredith Hodnot
speaker
299 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Jul
Meredith Hodnot’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Karen Clark says she wasn't that nervous when she walked into the Lloyd's of London offices, one of the oldest and, at the time, most powerful insurance marketplaces in the world.
She was there to tell over 100 well-dressed, very polite British men that they were doing their job all wrong.
Karen was using newfangled 1980s computers to model the worst case scenario.
A devastating climate catastrophe.
And her model said a disaster like a direct hurricane hit on Miami would cost the insurance industry $60 billion.
Nearly 10 times more than these experts thought possible.
Risk is a combination of two things.
First, the hazard.
So in this case, the hurricanes.
And the second part of risk is the exposure.
In other words, what are the things, buildings, bridges, property that are in the path of the hurricane?
But it didn't take long before Karen's catastrophe models were put to the test.
Raging storm surges and treacherous winds battered Florida's southern coast.
Karen and her team ran the numbers again and again, trying to get a sense of just how much devastation Andrew would bring.
But as the storm passed, the destructive power of Andrew was clear.
At the time, this was 1992, Andrew was one of the strongest and most expensive storms to have hit the country, with insurance claims coming in over $15 billion.
In the aftermath, nearly a dozen insurance companies went bankrupt, the whole industry was in shock, and Andrew had just missed downtown Miami.
All of a sudden, Karen's fringe models seemed prophetic.
Hurricane Andrew was a risk reckoning.
rippling out from southern Florida to the whole world as global insurance markets completely transformed their perspective on the risk of climate disaster.
Showing 21–40 of 299 · page 2 of 15
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