Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 07/01/2008 5:14:15 AM PDT by Brilliant
Scientists say the jury is still out on whether rising sea temperatures will cause more hurricanes to hit U.S. coastlines. Yet some insurance companies are boosting premiums based on assumptions that they will...
Costs for homeowner insurance along the East and Gulf coasts have risen 20% to 100% since 2004, says the Insurance Information Institute... In the three years through 2006, says the institute, property and casualty insurers registered record profits, topping out at $65.8 billion in 2006...
Helping to drive these developments is a little-known tool of the insurance world: Computerized catastrophe modeling. Crafted by several independent firms and used by most insurers, so-called cat models rely on complex data to estimate probable losses from hurricanes.
But regulators and other critics contend that the latest cat models -- which include assumptions about various climate changes -- are triggering higher insurance rates...
In the wake of the punishing 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, many cat models saw drastic revisions. Rather than take a traditional longterm view, some attempted to estimate what might happen in the next several years... The result: big premium hikes and higher deductibles.
Underlying the newer cat models are scientific theories that rising sea temperatures will result in more intense, and possibly more frequent, hurricanes...
Large reinsurance companies, such as Swiss Re and Munich Re, were early converts to theories of global warming and cite warming of the earth's oceans when predicting massive damages from future storms.
"Losses from hurricanes and tropical storms have risen along with sea temperatures," says Eberhard Faust, a climate scientist at Munich Re...
However, scientists remain divided over how that may affect the number and intensity of hurricanes making landfall in the coastal U.S. A few climate experts believe global warming might actually cause fewer hurricanes to come ashore...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I’m thinking the liberals will just get the vapors over the “obscene profits” of the insurance companies and slap some frilly-named tax on them. Maybe give a few $$$ to New Orleans or something.
We have met the enemy ... it is us.
live on the east coast of florida, just got dropped by state farm after they doubled our rate and depleted our escrow acct. now we have to get inspected and go into citizens due to the age of the house. rate is double what it was. screwed again. at least buy us dinner and give us a kiss first.
I’m in Orlando ,, newer house that meets all the codes and am not in a “high wind” area with no chance of flooding (90 foot drop to dried lakebed about 1/2 mile away and I’m getting hit too ,, was dropped by a major a few years ago and am now paying 4x what I should ,,, next stop state run “Citizens Insurance” ,, am I just imagining things or are we all being herded into socialism on this front ...
We need a bigtime class action lawsuit against these insurance bullies ... long term models are the only valid way to predict rates ... using this BS global warming (which the warming people don’t even stand by now) is CRIMINAL.
Another example of how big government creates all the things leftists blame on big business.
one way to make rates more affordable would be to allow outside competition from other states. although i am becoming more and more resigned to the fact each day that there really isn’t anything that any of us can do. the rules have been written in such a way that the little people can not change anything. the people in office have seen to that. we keep saying to vote them out but the problem is the rules don’t allow anyone new that would make a change to enter the race becasue it costs to damn much. the only way out of this mess if it keeps going the way it is will be a revolution i am afraid. but then again they have passafied so many of the herd that they will just sit back and take it. ok, off my soap box.
I wish I could say that. My rates in eastern N.C. were: $1100 in 2002, $1800 in 2006, $3000 in 2007, $4000 in 2008 -- and that is not in a flood zone.
On a sunny day I can walk down to the electric meter under my porch and watch it spin the wrong way. As long as the sun stays out, the solar panels on my roof make me a utility. It's a sweet feeling, knowing that my neighbor's air conditioner is running off the panels above my head. By their very nature, fuels like solar and wind are diffuse and dispersed: instead of a few people digging or drilling them from the ground, a great many of us can harvest them from the planet's surface.
To really make localized power generation work you need a community. Ask yourself why Japan leads the world in building a decentralized solar-panel energy economy. Because it has so much sun (it doesn't), or because it has so much fellowship? Because it is equatorial (it isn't) or because people feel both an obligation to one another and an ability to trust one another?
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