Global Warming Seen Pushing up Insurance Costs

[nam78_two]

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=11425
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WASHINGTON -- Global warming will push up insurance premiums in high-risk areas like coastal Florida and other hurricane-prone parts of the United States, an insurance company official said Tuesday.

"That it will cost more, there's no question; we can put that on the table right at the beginning," said Clem Booth, a board member of Allianz Group . "The pricing of an insurance portfolio in a coastal region is a matter of the number of incidents to be expected within a given time and the size of incidents at certain levels."

Other likely consequences of global warming, including an increase in wildfires in the American West, will also need to be taken into account by U.S. insurers, according to a report released by Allianz and conservation group World Wildlife Fund.

"To me as an insurance person, climate change is an absolute reality," Booth said in a telephone interview. "We could debate to what extent it's affected by human activity or not but it doesn't change the fact that we have to deal with the additional risks."

Currently, he said, insurers withdraw from these high-risk areas entirely.

"We're in the business of solving our customers' problems and providing risk solutions, so pulling out may be a short-term way of doing that ... but getting into the underlying causes is fundamental to our business," Booth said.

The report, "Climate Change and Insurance: An Agenda for Action in the United States," found that U.S. insurance companies are good at modeling risk on historical models, but they lag behind their European counterparts in studying climate change to estimate future risk.

WAKING UP TO RISK

"This report and other reports are making it clear that there is a direct correlation between climate change, forest fires, storm surges and people's livelihoods," said Carter Roberts, president of World Wildlife Fund in the United States. "I think right now the U.S. public is waking up to just what an enormous risk this represents for them."
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[tk2kewl]

1. I wonder if I can get extinction insurance?

:shrug:

[BootinUp]

2. They vote in Shrub and then raise the rates

becuase of something they don't believe in and don't want to try and prevent!

[nam78_two]

3. yeah-the fact that they don't "believe" in global warming

Never stops them from making money off of its effects :eyes: