Global warming deniers can deny all they want. But your insurance company can deny too - deny keeping your rates the same or deny insuring that beach-front condo.
Florida real estate is looking less and less attractive by the day. Good luck out there people of Florida. You're gonna need it. (and Alabama, and Mississippi, and South Carolina, and Texas, ...). And the US doesn't have the money to keep bailing you out.
Lloyd's of London, the world's oldest insurer, offered a gloomy forecast of floods, droughts and disastrous storms over the next 50 years in a recently published report on impending climate changes.
"These things are fact, not hypothesis," said Wendy Baker, the president of Lloyd's America in an interview on Monday. "You don't have to be a believer in global warming to recognize the climate is changing. The industry has to get ready for the changes that are coming."
In a report on catastrophe trends Lloyd's is disseminating to the insurance industry, a bevy of British climate experts, including Sir David King, chief scientist to the British government, warn of increased flooding in coastal areas and a rapid rise in sea level as ice caps melt in Greenland and Antarctica.
"The property casualty industry had an easy year in 2006, when there were no U.S. hurricanes," Baker said. "But the next one may make Katrina look inexpensive."
In August, 2005 Hurricane Katrina slammed into the U.S. Gulf Coast, costing the industry more than $38 billion and making it the most destructive storm in terms of property losses ever.
But hurricane modelers say a storm like Katrina hitting the Miami area of Florida or New York could cost as much as $100 billion.
But hurricane modelers say a storm like Katrina hitting the Miami area of Florida or New York could cost as much as $100 billion.
