Multiple media outlets, including CNN, The New York Times (NYT), Euro News, and The New Republic, recently posted articles complaining that the real estate website Zillow was removing “climate risk scores” from its home listing info, claiming that it puts homebuyers at risk. [emphasis, links added]
The mainstream media outlets are wrong, and Zillow is right. Its decision to de-emphasize climate scores is sound and puts no one at risk, but could make homes more saleable.
The scores Zillow previously relied upon were unscientific, biased, and inaccurate.
In CNN’s article, “The real estate industry is pressuring Zillow and other sites to nix extreme weather risk data buyers have come to rely on,” the organization that Zillow is using for its “climate risk assessments,” First Street, says that its data is “more accurate than limited federal data like FEMA flood maps.”
It touts success with its predictions regarding California wildfire risk, yet fails badly when it comes to flood risk.
The California Regional Multiple Listing Service looked into First Street’s assessments and told The New York Times:
“[W]hen we saw entire neighborhoods with a 50 percent probability of the home flooding this year and a 99 percent probability of the home flooding in the next five years, especially in areas that haven’t flooded in the last 40 to 50 years, we grew very suspicious.”
Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, compared First Street’s flood predictions for individual homes to real-world flood events and found that the company’s model fell short, because “trying to say that you can differentiate the risk of one house versus another seems to not be substantiated by these results.”
It’s important to note that First Street is not a neutral risk analysis firm. It was formed specifically to connect climate change to property risk, nothing else.
It starts with the assumption that climate change threatens homes and businesses, and then designs its analyses to make the connection and demonstrate how bad the threat is.
First Street is a climate alarm advocacy group rather than a legitimate risk assessment firm.
Climate Realism previously reported on First Street’s poor modeling and tunnel-visioned predictions, all of which lean heavily on a theory of catastrophic and rapid climate change and flawed climate models and scenarios, none of which are proving out in reality.
Earlier this year, for instance, First Street claimed that nearly half of Fresno residents would move from the area by 2055 due to climate risk.
Local weather data and housing market analyses showed the report was nonsense, and even locals who otherwise agree with the climate emergency narrative found the report overly alarmist.
Unfortunately, these faulty and suspect scoring systems do have real impacts on home sales.
Zillow’s research found homes claimed as “at extreme risk” sell for less money, if they are able to sell at all. Worse, homeowners are not able to challenge the scores given by First Street, even when they are inaccurate.
CNN admits that it uses First Street data and maps, too, laughably commenting that “while models that predict climate change on a global level have largely been consistent and accurate, Chegwidden conducted a study in 2024 that found risk modeling can have wide-ranging variations at an individual property level.”
The latter part of the statement is true, but the opening is false. Climate modelling is well known to be bad at making accurate predictions, even on things as straightforward as global average temperature.
Popular models run way hotter than real-world data have shown, as Climate Realism has explained many times, and other climate scientists admit.
Model scenarios like RCP 8.5 predict temperature changes that are implausible at best, physically impossible at worst.
Other outlets, like Euronews’ post “Nowhere to move: How climate change became the property market’s biggest nightmare,” claim the so-called climate crisis is one of the “biggest threats” to the property market.
Relying on attribution studies, Euronews claims that the Los Angeles wildfires were due to climate change, and more properties are impacted by increasingly frequent and extreme weather disasters around the world.
Again, Euronews, like CNN, is wrong. Global weather losses as a percentage of GDP have declined over time, not increased. (See figure below)
Extreme weather events are not becoming more frequent or extreme according to measured and historical data.
Events like the L.A. wildfires of last January, while certainly a disaster, were not unprecedented, and neither were the conditions that contributed to their severity. If these events are not actually being worsened by climate change, First Street’s whole premise is moot.
Property values in the U.S. that First Street claims should be falling have continued to climb amid the modest warming of the past century.
A previous Climate Realism post critiquing First Street’s alarmism, “False, CNBC, Climate Change Is Not Causing a Housing Market Collapse,” demonstrated this clearly.
That post notes “to the extent that insured losses have climbed in recent years, it is a result of increasing amounts of property being insured in areas prone to natural disasters, as populations, homes, and businesses in those regions have increased dramatically.”
Simply put, if there is more property to destroy by flooding or other weather disasters, then when those events occur, they will impact more property. It’s not because of climate change.
Yet First Street’s climate risk “analyses” have dinged home values by sticking them with bogus scores, doing economic damage to the real estate market and individual property sellers, possibly greater than recent natural disasters themselves.
It seems strange that media outlets are flocking to be the white knight for First Street and save its reputation. It is not the only company that does these kinds of “climate risk” analyses, and some other companies seem to be more transparent with their modelling and data, as admitted by CNN in its post.
Perhaps it is because First Street is among those risk companies that explicitly generate reports and content for climate alarmists to use to scare the public, even though its risk assessments are not well-founded in objective data and real-world conditions.
For the mainstream media, it seems, generating fear is more important than accurate reporting.
Top photo by Handiwork NYC on Unsplash
Read more at Climate Realism
Earlier this year, for instance, First Street claimed that nearly half of Fresno residents would move from the area by 2055 due to climate risk.
Sure, put the risk 30 years in the future which makes it impossible to disprove in the near-term. This is what climate alarmists do over and over. The problem is decades away and the media swallow it whole and regurgitate it in their reporting. They never push back on how, in this case First Street, came to the conclusion they are pushing.