President Obama understands, but judging by recent coverage the America media is still in the dark. Very few seem to realize that North Dakota’s devastating floods are just the opening salvo in what will become a steady stream of severe weather stories. After two relatively cool years thanks to a strong La Niña event — years that would have been scorching hot by Victorian standards — scientists are predicting that either 2009 or 2010 will be the warmest on record, and that warming will accelerate dramatically over the next decade. And though it’s impossible to peg any one event to climate change, the likelihood for severe weather is increasing.
“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating,” Obama told reporters this week. “If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota and you say to yourself, ‘If you see an increase of two degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?’ That indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.”
If politics makes you mistrust the White House, then perhaps pay attention to the insurance industry.
Beginning in 2010, the U.S. National Association of Insurance Commissioners will require insurance companies with annual premiums in excess of $500 million US to file yearly Insurer Climate Risk Disclosure Surveys. This will be the world’s first climate risk disclosure requirement, complete with reports on risk management and catastrophic models, and on how companies are working with clients to mitigate climate risk. The disclosure’s framework was developed with Ceres over the past two years, and regulators will use the disclosure statements to evaluate insurers’ solvency with regard to the risks of drought, flooding, wildfires, and other climate events.
The same truth is confronting insurers across the pond. A new report from the Association of British Insurers (ABI) says that the association’s previous climate change estimates (from 2005) were far too conservative, and that their estimates for future premiums will increase accordingly. Businesses and homes in areas likely to experience serious climate change-related events could see their premiums more than double. Natural disaster coverage premiums have increased already following 2008′s record number of dramatic weather events in the U.K.
Cross posted on Triple Pundit
________
Update: Corrected Victoria to read Victorian.
“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating,”
Yeah, devastating to our economy with the TOTUS sock puppet in charge.
‘If you see an increase of two degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?’
Let’s see, given that the flooding was due to ice dams downriver and frozen previously saturated ground that could not absorb the water in the vicinity of the flooding, the flooding might not have happened?
And you think the sock puppet is somehow brilliant?
Add the fact that most of the property damage was to buildings in a 100-year flood plain and gee…why are we surprised? There’s a reason we call them flood plains!
It never ceases to amaze me that you alarmists criticize when a skeptic cites a weather event as a counter-argument to warming, then you blythely do the exact same thing.
BTW, if you checked Victoria’s overall summer temps, they were down. They had a bad couple of weeks where temps spiked which happened to coincide with the fires. The fires were not due to “global warming” but to piss-poor forestry management. Human fatalities were higher this time to increased population density, but this was not the worst fire in Victoria’s history in terms of acreage burned.
…following 2008’s record number of dramatic weather events in the U.K.
You mean like all the record snow and cold this winter?