Free Republic

The insurance industry is increasingly wary of the risks presented by climate and natural disasters, prompting major firms to scale back their presence in more vulnerable states. In June, Farmers Insurance announced in a company memo it will no longer write new property insurance policies in Florida, citing “catastrophe costs … at historically high levels.” Earlier in the month, AIG stopped issuing policies along the Sunshine State’s hurricane-vulnerable coastline. Those followed State Farm, California’s largest single homeowners’ insurer, which in May announced a moratorium on new policies in the state, blaming “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.” The decision came after years...

...Many of history’s greatest catastrophes arise from not taking people at their word, and, indeed, disbelieving well established patterns of behavior...

West Virginia News This text is from a county emergency manager out in Phillippi West Virginia after the recent snow storm. WEATHER BULLETIN [quote] Up here in the hills we just recovered from a Historic event --- may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" --- with a historic blizzard of up to 10" inches of snow and winds to 30 MPH that broke trees in half, , closed all roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 80% of the County. This began October 25th and as of 10/31/05 many are still with power and of...

Michael Crichton has written that rarest of books, an ­intellectually dishonest novel. Crichton has made a fortune exploiting the public’s fears: Prey (fear of nanotechnology), Rising Sun (fear of Japanese technological supremacy), and Jurassic Park (fear of biotechnology). These books attack the hubris of those who use technology without wisdom. In Prey, he warns, “The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do.” Given the author’s past, one might expect that a Crichton book on global warming would warn about the risk of catastrophic climate change—the...

Elements of Surprise by Gregg Easterbrook Nature does not know best," the ecologist Rene Dubos--best known for coining the expression "think globally, act locally"--once wrote. Dubos's worry was that the environmental movement was beginning to depict the natural condition as Edenic and benign, when in fact nature is a mass murderer. The Indian Ocean tsunami tragedy ought to be seen as a reminder that the Earth can be a very dangerous place to live. ... . ... Productivity and planning might reduce the harm done by natural disasters--anti-earthquake building engineering, for example. ... there is no foreseeable technology that could...

London, Mar 18, 2003 (allAfrica.com/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- As cash is poured into the war with Iraq and its aftermath, the world could soon be confronted by a humanitarian funding crisis graver than any since the end of the Second World War, according to George Monbiot, a London-based writer and visiting professor of environmental science at the University of East London. A worsening emergency is engulfing Africa, where aid flows have slowed to a tiny portion of what is required. There is surely no more obvious symptom of the corruption of western politics than the disproportion between...

Heavenly bodies stir up routine catastrophes March 18 2003 at 01:30PM By Graeme Addison Legend has it that when two people get together and er... bond, the Earth will move – at least in a metaphorical sense. Likewise, it takes two heavenly bodies, an impactor and a target, to come together with Earth-shattering force to form a crater. There’s nothing dreamlike about this: it happens, frequently, throughout the solar system. Impact catastrophes are routine. Just over two-billion years ago, a chunk of asteroid at least the size of Table Mountain struck the landmass that is now South Africa. It hurtled...

The Climax of a Turbulent Millennium: Evidence for Major Impact Events in the late Third Millennium BC Timo Niroma, Helsinki, Finland The First Intermediate PeriodThe Curse of AkkadTroy IIgThird Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World CollapseNatural Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisations Two separate cataclysmsSodom and GomorrahWhere did the impacts occur? The First Intermediate Period Selections from "The Egyptians" by C. Aldred (London 1987). "At this distance of time, the overthrow of the Old Kingdom at the end of the Sixth Dynasty has all the appearance of being sudden and complete. "Recent research has attributed the abrupt nature of...

Ancient history as taught today is a disaster area. The chronology of the first and second millennium BCE is badly wrong. The history of ancient history revisionism offered here is drawn largely from the pages of SIS publications over the last 25 years. The Revision of Ancient History - A Perspective By P John Crowe. An edited and extended version of a paper presented to the SIS Jubilee Conference, Easthampstead Park, Sept. 17-19th 1999 [1] Internet Paper Revision no.1 March 2001 Contents Introduction An Outline History of Revising Ancient History - Up to 1952. 2.1 Exaggerating Antiquity. 2.2 The Early...